Any trivia nerd could tell you, and probably has told you, that Oreo is in fact a knock off of another sandwich cookie: Hydrox. Oreo was created to be a competitor and was intended to gain market share by way of a softer cookie and a sweeter filling. Similarly, Excel, the spreadsheet program used globally for children’s schoolwork and the financial reports of fortune 500 companies alike, is itself a knock off.
The original spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, debuted in 1982, and was designed to work primarily with MSDOS. Not wanting to be outdone by Lotus Development corp, the small tech startup from Cambridge, Massachusetts (and before tech startups were cool), Microsoft released Excel three years later, differentiated it from lotus by being usable on apple products and being substantially faster.
Lotus Development corp. would lose this battle for spreadsheet supremacy, but later go on to be acquired by IBM.
In just three years, a better product for reporting and analytics was planned, developed, and launched, forever changing the tech field. Why, then, would we still be using the same tool nearly forty years later for business-critical reports?
Don’t get me wrong, spreadsheets are irreplaceable in many circumstances, but I’ve recently been a part of operations where it was the norm for a particular employee to spend upwards of ten hours each month updating just one excel report! It would then be emailed to the board members, typically three to four days after the data had been collected.
To reiterate – that is over 120 man hours per year on a single report, and by the time the report was usable, the data was at least three days old, assuming the report maker was not on vacation at the time, and was subject to the occasional human error.
It genuinely shocked me that nobody was thinking that no one was thinking “there has to be a better way” – because there is a better way. The thing about month over month reporting is that it generally is meant to be done exactly the same way each month – this allows for an accurate comparison between months, and also makes reporting easily automatable.
Microsoft has since launched not one, but two different reporting tools that could better manage the report.
SSRS, or SQL Server Reporting Services was launched in 2004, and comes free with most versions of SQL server. It can read excel sheets as well as gather data from SQL server, SSAS (SQL Server Analytics services) and most other Microsoft tools. Additionally, it can use parameters to create reports on specific date ranges, and send those reports out automatically on a schedule, which would give the users access to the report much faster.
If the emailed report isn’t optimal, Microsoft also launched PowerBI in 2017. Now businesses have the ability to create reports that are accurate to the second, and can then check 24/7 from their laptop or their phone, securely, and with very little maintenance.
If you have reports in excel, it is worth checking to see if it is automatable.n