Note: This is a new series in which I'll be discussing the pros and cons of using spreadsheet tools for performance management. See the intro/background post and part 2 (it's everywhere and it's easy).
Part 3: Pros – Excel is powerful and flexible.
Long ago, on my first day of my first job, I made a fool of myself. My new boss was describing some things I’d be doing and used the phrase “add new breaks to existing reports.” I asked what breaks were. He looked at me stunned and said “Good lord, haven’t you ever written a program?”
Well I had written lots of programs to get my degrees in Computer Science. But in school we wrote programs that did things. In the real world, most people wrote programs that generated reports. Sure there were tools to help, but creating a report basically meant writing a program to get, assemble, format, and print data.
Skip forward to today. Yes, lots of people still write programs to generate reports. But I’d bet most reports are made with Excel. That “break” the tripped me up is simply a column subtotal. Excel makes it easy to have any number of levels of subtotals. You can show all levels, pick your level, or drill though levels. You can automatically color code different summary levels. You can specify headers and footers.
Excel makes it easy to generate reports with nicely formatted data and charts. There are built in templates to get you started. You can create just about and chart you can thing of and tweak it’s colors, data points, legends, series labels, and on and on and on.
Mere mortals can even pull data from databases to generate reports. Heck, some people use Excel as a database. It works great for disciplined managers who can get a report exactly like the want it as well as for type of manager that changes what they want to look at every month.
Excel is also more powerful than most people think. If you are really adventurous (or crazy) you can have spreadsheets with 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. That would give you enough cells to record the name of every person on earth. And the names of their pets.*
So Excel is a flexible, powerful reporting solution. Next time we will see that it is also an analysis tool. Then we will see how this ease of use, flexibility, and power induces an unwarranted sense of security for people trying to use it to really drive business results.
In the meantime, if you'd like a sneak peek into some of the challenges organizations face trying manage scorecards and dashboards in Excel, check out our "Top 10" list of signs your scorecards have outgrown Excel.
*(believe me, I did the math)
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