Developing Better Spreadsheet Models

There are various ways you can suffer in spreadsheet hell, as these real-life examples illustrate.

With Excel now the dominant spreadsheet system, we’ve already looked at how to escape Excel Hell in the articles on these subjects where understanding the limitations of Excel means there are better alternatives:

• For business processes
• For reporting
• For planning and forecasting

But what about for financial modelling? [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Unlocking Business Processes

You start a new business or activity. This may be within an existing business. The easiest thing to do is to log what happens in a spreadsheet, typically Excel.

The next thing you know is that there are a team of people tripping over each other trying to use the same spreadsheet. Copies are taken and you quickly lose track of  [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Improving Month-End Reporting

It’s month end. Reports need to be produced. The finance team are ordering in pizza to get them through the evening. Why? The only way they can produce the information that Group and local management require is to download transaction data to a spreadsheet and reanalyse it. Sound familiar?

It’s not just at month-end. The same thing happens at other times of the month, whenever any other reports need to be produced. So-called “analysts” are spending too much of their time as “Excel jockeys” rather than [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – The Ultimate Add-In?

It’s easy to outgrow Excel’s capabilities for a specific application. The only option is often to replace Excel with a system designed properly for the specific job.

There are other occasions where by using an add-in, such as gauges, you can achieve something valuable which you can’t do with Excel alone.

But often it makes sense for familiarity to use Excel linked to a database, for  [...read more...]