Excel works very well for single users with small datasets but if the business works it breaks in various ways. Sharepoint was the solution to scale excel but it didn't seem to have been successful as a tool.
The upside is higher quality, the downside is way reduced turnaround speed if they need to change something.
I understand why people using Excel are often reluctant to give it up.
Think about anything that you do in Excel. In what scenario do you roll with exactly what you initially start with?
I just did a preliminary capital forecast in Excel. I could have used something like Google sheets as well, but beyond that, the lack of flexibility makes purpose built solutions less able without specialized people that I don’t have or domain knowledge that I don’t possess.
no. this does not happen. everyone uses excel.
At my current job (late-ish stage SF startup), most of us default to Google Sheets, but there have been enough use cases for "real" Excel alone to warrant setting up Office 365 licensing/accounts and defining a flow for that at the corporate level instead of just one-off licenses here and there.
Our finance team in particular (or at least specific key members thereof) has to use the Windows version of excel because both the macOS version and Google Sheets rapidly buckle under the datasets they're manipulating in their monthly reconciliations. My team has been working on various tools and systems (mostly as extensions to our ERP) to better automate some of these things, but Excel is still a reality until that happens for all their use cases.
At which, again from my perspective and view of things which may be wrong, startups are more likely to automate/productize that so they can better maintain and dogfood it if possible instead of letting someone's Excel workbook grow into a pet ML tool that only they understand.
But if you start your business with your stock and order tracking in excel, your customer list in excel, and your accounts in excel, it's not unusual to outgrow excel in some of those areas fairly quickly.
Without difficulty? No, definitely not. The difficulty is always there, it's just internalized, ignored or worked around in various (often crazy) ways.
The baseline difficulty of using excel is not what I'm talking about and I don't consider it relevant since experience has proven that baseline difficulty is not much of an obstacle to real adoption.
A lot of companies don’t want to invest in tech they don’t control or understand.
I've seen these trends around "Unbundling" Excel:
- Improve UX by specializing UI
- Increase automation with software integration
1) Running business of Excel has many of the same problems as other software
2) Excel has some key advantages over other software
The article mentions that Excel doesn't need much onboarding. I don't think that's its only advantage. Also, to solve the general software development problems around Excel, one has to match the near-zero onboarding barrier of Excel, otherwise those solutions will get left behind.
Does the experience of Sharepoint bear this out?
The main advantage of Excel, which leaves us pessimistic on the long-term viability of the niche SaaS solutions, is the "hackability". There's an incredible depth of tooling and market expertise around Excel, from mundane formula structures to macros to addins and COM automation. Thousands of office workers who otherwise have little programming experience are extremely adept at solving problems with Excel.
The SaaS solutions might individually solve different problems, but are not really designed to play nice with each other (nor are they really incentivized to work well together).
Then don't have people check out files and check them back in. Only programmers like that kind of nonsense! 99% of the time, let people "nominate" a particular copy of the file as authoritative. If something happens to that particular person's copy, let's say their machine gets smashed, then the latest version can be downloaded by their coworker, and an admin can nominate that copy as authoritative. People then go back to the 99% case of just using Excel and saving their file.
The main advantage of Excel, which leaves us pessimistic on the long-term viability of the niche SaaS solutions, is the "hackability". There's an incredible depth of tooling and market expertise around Excel, from mundane formula structures to macros to addins and COM automation. Thousands of office workers who otherwise have little programming experience are extremely adept at solving problems with Excel.
Therefore, a SaaS solution needs to let people do what they've always done, only better. Don't try to make them act like programmers. Don't change their behavior one iota, unless they're getting a payoff of nifty functionality in exchange. As much as possible, just let them act like they've always done.
The SaaS solutions might individually solve different problems, but are not really designed to play nice with each other (nor are they really incentivized to work well together).
One SaaS solution which can solve dataflow and versioning with ultra-low friction could be the one ring to rule them all. All the other SaaS solutions could be built on top of that. The problem is keeping everything super low friction.
They are great for small projects and prototyping, but just don't scale well unless you want to pay for expensive babysitting.
Note a good CRUD app allows exporting of data to Excel for searching or experimenting with budget scenarios etc., but the "original" data should be in a real database.
All those things take less effort if you already know how to use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Python. If you don’t, but do know how to use a spreadsheet, it takes vastly less effort to do those in a spreadsheet than to learn how to do those with a LAMP stack.
And there are orders of magnitude more people in the latter group than in the former, and their time generally costs much less on the open market.
Which, to be clear, I don’t think is a good thing! Doing those things with a spreadsheet is worse in every way—effectiveness, maintainability, you name it—except this one way. But it’s usually the only one that matters.
My dream, coming soon to an Internet near you, is to “democratize” the things that come easy to us “real programmers”.