Having worked with some teams/stakeholders who have programs and SOPs that are very tightly coupled with the excel, csv data handling I do have a few observations:
- These processes and SOPs are actually quite optimal for low scale use-cases but as organizations grow they find themselves in a tough space where even after you have a hiring spree going on everything seems to be falling apart and not maintainable.
- You almost always do lose out on an audit trail. Now, you don't always need an audit trail but if you find your org sharing tons of excel docs being shared on a regular basis you do need a tech integration to solve it. The lack of it means a gap in identifying things that can be made simple and no way to identify / fix things that may have gone wrong over a period of time.
- I fully agree with the statement
. Ideally, it seems, support both. Allow rapid ingress and egress of data to/from Excel . The data in systems in software systems is useless it's almost always meant to be consumed by humans (mostly). And that just means while I do most of the authoritative processing in file format that computers do well with I allow it to be converted into a more human readable format which happens to be excel in some cases and visualizations in others.