This is the third of a series of articles about my experiences with the Corporate use of Excel, if you want, you can read Part 1 and Part 2.
As we saw in Part 2, The Excel Pros have so much experience and are so confident in Excel that for us, all problems in accounting, finance and other areas can be solved with more sophisticated uses of Excel.
The problem with that belief, as we saw in the previous article is that in the step of Collection and Handling of Big/Complex data, Excel originally was not designed nor was recommended to be the tool to use.
There comes a point in the Collect / Manipulate / Add business logic to the data, that moving from simple data to large/complex data becomes not like moving from a small to a larger nail, but like replacing the nail with a screw.
I remember when I fought for the first time face to face with problems of Excel as a tool. It was in the process of Budgeting, Controlling and Forecasting:
At that time, we spent 3-4 days a week staying until 7.30-8.00 pm onwards ... on Month ends things were even worst. WHY we stayed so late? One reason is that someone, somewhere, made a mistake in the process:
- It was often the burden of data: At some point the data upload for the current month was wrong, incomplete or replaced by mistake data from previous months
-Other times, someone had mistakenly changed a cell with formulas in a Excel file with many tabs, large and complex, altering the final values.
These human errors generally are NOT due to incompetent staff, but the fact that every month you have to repeat the process of loading very long and complex Data, and, sometimes in top of the data you have to add new tables or columns with business logic and analysis...
The more complex the process, the more steps there are, and more steps also means more ways to commit a mistake. Statistically, with enough number of repetitions, someone is going to make an error (it could be small, it could be large)
WHAT ARE THE MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES DOING TO SOLVE THIS CHALLENGE?
In part 4 of our installment we will discuss two free tools, PowerPivot and Power Query,that can support Excel to help manage large and complex DATA, and further in the articles,we will develop procedures to gradually go from where we are to where we want to be, in term of reducing our Excel Hell (term is explained in Part 1)
As always, your feedback will be greatly appreciated ... Long live the Excel Pros!