To Excel or not to Excel

Who doesn’t use Excel?

Office workers everywhere use it everyday- office assistants, analysts and managers use

Excel for storing data, accounting, budgeting, creating reports, for mathematical analysis, creating charts and for research and analytics. People love using Excel.

Well, love may be a strong word for it...but there’s certainly no getting away from Excel, that’s for sure!

Product Managers know well that when they provide even the most sophisticated tools,

users will more often than not export the data to Excel for additional analysis. This could just be for reviewing large number of records, or running some validations to double check what the tool did, or make updates to records to load them back into the software we provide. No matter how much functionality is built into the software, users cannot resist the temptation to bring it to the mighty Excel. Product Management has long held the opinion that Excel is one of their biggest competitors, and somehow they must win this battle.

Is this a fair assessment? Is this a battle that can be won? If we think of Excel as a tool that complements our software, rather than competes with it, then the perspective completely changes. After all Excel is a fairly sophisticated tool with lots of very useful features. Among other things, it offers functions like pivot tables, charts, formatting, and the ability to search and sort through data really quickly. In addition, the fact that it’s fairly easy to learn means that it has a very wide user base. Building the same level of functionality is nearly impossible for any software vendor (unless of course you are Google!)

As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. Or at least stop fighting them. Why not add features to our software so that the dialog with Excel becomes more compatible, seamless and audit-able. Give users the freedom to reap the benefits of Excel as they see fit. Just let them do what they want to do with it. Its unlikely that any software can satisfy all requirements that the client may have. At the end of the day, it's about providing valuable service to the customer. If Excel is willing to lend a helping hand, why not embrace it. Truce!