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.
- Poor integration with back-end systems
- No way of knowing what data is missing
- 2-dimensional, not sophisticated enough to model complex organizational structures; the process of defining hierarchies and creating aggregations is time-consuming and cumbersome
- Limited analytics capabilities (what-if scenario, forecasting, trending, time-based analysis, etc.)
- The ability to perform fast calculations across multiple dimensions is missing
- 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
- Lacks power: not robust and quick enough to support large data sets
- Multiple versions on multiple computers (controls and security)
- Lack of support for enterprise-wide collaboration (workflow, versions)
- Difficult to document and time-consuming to maintain as an enterprise platform
