Escaping Excel Hell – Processes Desperately Seeking Automation

A chat over a pint recently reminded me that many businesses still have lots of Excel-based processes, including reporting, that are inefficient and prone to error.

In many cases highly qualified and expensive “Excel jockeys” are spending most of their time manipulating data. Automation would let them be their job title – “business analysts” - who add proper value to the business.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of replacing Excel with [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Reporting

Excel has many useful features, including different types of graphs.

But there are two graphical tools that have only more recently become available as add-ins to more clearly portray information in management reports:

[...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Add-Ins for Excel

In an earlier article I mentioned that there are three principle ways to escape Excel hell.

The first is to make better use of the version you have, or upgrade to Excel 2010.

The second is to replace it with a database or specialist software such as budgeting/reporting.

The third is to use add-ins or integration. Looking at add-ins, there are several that are worth evaluating: [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Forecasting and Budgeting

What's the most common forecasting and budgeting tool? Undoubtably Excel. Whilst it is a powerful and useful tool, that will inevitably be loaded on every "contributor's" PC, forecasting is probably the main example of Excel Hell.

Whilst I was in industry, newly qualified, I was compiling the annual budget and managed to miss out two employees from the SUM function for their department's salary expense. Their annual salary was more than half the total company contingency. I had to explain this to the Board and the departmental manager in every month's management accounts commentary, until I managed to get agreement to formally use the contingency for the purpose. Ouch, that was painful! [...read more...]