NEUBRAINER, the official blog of Neubrain

“Spreadsheets Are An Excellent Hammer, But Not Everything in Your Business Is a Nail.” (Val Sribar, Meta Group)

Posted by Yana McConaty

After speaking with many customers about the disadvantages of using spreadsheets to support their company or enterprise-wide budgeting and planning activities, we’ve decided to come up with a short list that features technical limitations of spreadsheets.

  1. Poor integration with back-end systems
  2. No way of knowing what data is missing
  3. 2-dimensional, not sophisticated enough to model complex organizational structures; the process of defining hierarchies and creating aggregations is time-consuming and cumbersome
  4. Limited analytics capabilities (what-if scenario, forecasting, trending, time-based analysis, etc.)
  5. The ability to perform fast calculations across multiple dimensions is missing
  6. Lack of separation between logical structure and presentation. In other words, it lacks the ability to change grid-like data views (or other kind of external representation) without making changes to the data structure
  7. Lacks power: not robust and quick enough to support large data sets
  8. Multiple versions on multiple computers (controls and security)
  9. Lack of support for enterprise-wide collaboration (workflow, versions)
  10. Difficult to document and time-consuming to maintain as an enterprise platform

 

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Topics: budgeting, planning, excel

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neu·brain·er |n(y)o͞o brān ər|
noun

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