Spreadsheet

Those in the know have no qualms about celebrating Excel, their favorite productivity tool, on social media. When Alan Lepofsky has something to say about the future of work, people tend to listen. As a lead analyst at Constellation Research, technology and business experts regularly fill large amphitheaters to hear Lepofsky explain what kinds of tools and processes will change the way they accomplish everyday tasks and meet long-term objectives. It’s worth nothing, therefore, when someone of Lepofsky’s stature takes to Twitter to post a statement like this one: “I still use spreadsheets for so many things.” Nothing more, nothing less. Now stop and think for about moment about what gets shared on Twitter. The things that “trend” are often negative, whether it’s the latest political controversy in the U.S. or the shocking error involving the Best Picture category at the recent Oscar awards. When someone says something positive on Twitter out of the blue, you know it has to be based on a recent experience — presumably, in this case, a great experience. “One of the biggest myths is that spreadsheets could entirely be replaced. They aren’t right for everything, but (are) still indispensable.”  At the risk of reading too much into Lepofsky’s tweet, it sounds like the kind of thing many business professionals might say to themselves when they’ve recently turned to Excel to capture information, look something up, or solve a problem. Beyond simply validating spreadsheets at work, Lepofsky’s decision to share his feelings on social media speak to Excel’s varied use cases – a software that is often more of a platform than a niche productivity tool. Equally telling were the responses to Lepofsky’s tweet, which were almost universally in agreement. Take a reply from “Kenneth,” a software executive who jumped in right away: “Why should anyone have to feel guilty about that?” he asked. “Spreadsheets still have tremendous value.” Then there was Steve Ronan, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “trusted executive advisor, making good companies great.” He got to the heart of the current debate around Excel and offered his own reality check: “One of the biggest myths is that spreadsheets could entirely be replaced,” he wrote. “They aren’t right for everything, but (are) still indispensable.” There are some things that are really best discussed on social media services like Twitter. There are also some things that should probably be directed instead in face-to-face conversations within a particular organization’s walls. Occasionally, there are topics that belong in both spheres. This is one of them. Rather than merely “liking” or “retweeting” Lepofsky’s post, maybe it’s time to use it as the springboard for your own dialogue about how to continue using spreadsheets for multiple things, and even for processes you and your organization may never have considered before. The post What Some of the Smartest People on Twitter are Saying About Spreadsheets appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Lots of people will suggest spreadsheets should fade away, but they might be the best bridge between the old ways of working and the new. A couple of years ago, an online magazine called Backchannel published a surprising article with the headline, “A spreadsheet way of thinking.” It was surprising because Backchannel normally tends to focus on the next generation of technology — certainly not something as “obsolete” as Excel spreadsheets are often said to be. “I think (the) spreadsheet is at least to calculation what word processors are to writing … It is incredible how much software is written solely to “do better than a spreadsheet.” And how much fails at it.” And yet, according to the author, “The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view — reality by the numbers. If the perceptions of those who play a large part in shaping our world are shaped by spreadsheets, it is important that all of us understand what this tool can and cannot do.” That’s a much different stance than the many experts who suggest spreadsheets are laborious to use and inevitably error-prone. What the article suggested, however, is that spreadsheets represent the foundation for a lot of what startups are doing today. If you want proof, you just have to look at a thread on the message board of YCombinator, the famous Silicon Valley incubator that nurtures all manner of entrepreneurs. “I think (the) spreadsheet is at least to calculation what word processors are to writing,” said one. The last comment reads, “It is incredible how much software is written solely to “do better than a spreadsheet.” And how much fails at it.” Some of the comments like a rebuttal of sorts to “Avoiding Spreadsheet Hell,” an article published here on Banking Technology that came out around the same time and which detailed some of the most common complaints about Excel. When you look more closely, though, you realize that the problems and limitations with spreadsheets weren’t necessarily untrue: they just hadn’t been addressed yet. In fact, according to a research report from McKinsey last year, automation is sweeping all areas of financial services, with possibly 43 per cent of the tasks workers spend time on today being dealt with by software or even artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean we should fear robots taking over the office: instead, it’s an opportunity to figure out the best way to easily transition into new ways of working. For example, if it becomes easier to import rather than manually enter data into an Excel spreadsheet, we should all welcome it. If it frees up teams to take a closer look at what those spreadsheets contain, even better. The key is making sure those teams can take on that higher-level work in a way that makes them feel empowered rather than intimidated. Banks have already gone through this on the customer-facing side. Whether it was the introduction of ATMs many years ago or more recent moves to mobile apps, smart financial institutions have always put a priority on guiding customers in using these new tools and making them look and feel as natural as traditional face-to-face transactions at the teller as possible. As the scope of analytics widens in banking, business leaders will need to apply the same kind of change management principles to their employees. It’s not just about embracing a spreadsheet way of thinking: it’s about supporting the fact that many people continue to have a spreadsheet way of doing. The post Why the Future of Financial Services Will Still Have a lot of Rows and Cells appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Yet another businessperson speaks up for spreadsheets, while survey and user data show Excel’s longevity is a given.  Daniella Borg has so many daughters you could almost picture her using Microsoft Excel to keep track of them all. “If you want to survive as a business owner in this industry (or any other for that matter), you’d better love Excel spreadsheets – big, complicated ones – not just cost reports.” A single mother overseeing the lives of nine (count ‘em) girls ranging in age from 12 to 27, Borg and her brood are the stars of Family Rules, a recently launched reality TV program broadcast in Australia. Her world is obviously busy — maybe almost as busy as Renee Kennedy, one of the show’s producer. In a diary-style piece on Mumbrella where she walked through a typical day in her life, Kennedy noted that the work she and her producing partner Cody do is not all fun and games. Kennedy might not work in a finance department, but her deep attachment to Excel — and her willingness to take on complex analysis, using Excel as a database — is telling. As she pointed out, spreadsheets are a foundational piece of business in all kinds of markets. TV production is just the latest example. “Cody and I have a deep love of Excel spreadsheets,” she said. “If you want to survive as a business owner in this industry (or any other for that matter), you’d better love Excel spreadsheets – big, complicated ones – not just cost reports.” Financial services, on the other hand, is where you might expect Excel to be as popular as e-mail. And you’d be right. Banking Exchange recently published stats from a survey that shows 86% of total financial services respondents use spreadsheets to supplement their company’s core system, and 75% use spreadsheets for additional modeling and analysis. “They still like having this familiar standby at hand to supplement more modern analytical tools. What handyman doesn’t have a favorite screwdriver or wrench?” the article said. “Banking’s iron grip on Excel and the like is not just a matter of preference, however. It gets at what banks and other organizations increasingly wish to do with the data they have—and data they know they have to find.” The allegiance to Excel doesn’t mean its evolution has stalled. In fact, WinBuzzer posted news from researcher 7Park Data that revealed Excel on mobile racked up a higher number of monthly active users last year than Google Sheets for the first time. The analysts weren’t surprised: “Excel’s steady growth over time suggests an opportunity for Microsoft to claim its place as a leader in office and productivity apps on mobile. The trick is to not just transfer everything one can do using Excel on a desktop to mobile, but also identify different needs and habits of users on-the-go and new opportunities they can bring.” A lot of what you see on reality TV may be less than true, but the ongoing testimonials, survey data and user growth across different devices are facts you can’t ignore.

Originally published on The Enterprises Project in 10 IT Leaders Weigh in on Their Biggest Talent Gaps for 2017.  The future of technology is rife with challenges old and new (think: security and IoT security), and opportunities for digital disruption are up for grabs (I’m looking at you, artificial intelligence). As CIOs plan for the year ahead, they’re assessing the capabilities of their teams and identifying areas where they need to boost their skills. We wanted to know:  What are the biggest IT talent gaps or considerations for CIOs today? A talent gap that can’t be closed  “How [companies] build their infrastructure to ensure resilience, disaster recovery and scale is of critical importance.”  Cloud: Most cloud companies use hosting providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. How they build their infrastructure to ensure resilience, disaster recovery and scale is of critical importance. However, there is a talent gap when companies believe they need to hire people who meet specific profiles for such jobs (i.e. DevOps Engineer). What happens is they hire IT administrators as opposed to software engineers. Consequently, they miss out on the critical computer science background needed to really build a rock solid cloud infrastructure. Hiring strong computer scientists with a propensity or desire to learn cloud infrastructure is key. Security: In a cloud world, security is of critical importance. Every company should have a team focused on security but it shouldn’t end there. Security needs to be the responsibility of everyone on a team. Because this area is so fluid and ever-evolving, no one person will be able to fully catch everything. To augment this, it’s worthwhile to hire third party security testing firms to test and validate your infrastructure as an anonymous and signed-in user. From my perspective, security is a talent gap that can’t ever be truly closed. The post Cloud Security: A Talent Gap that Can’t be Closed appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Just how many rows and columns can you put in there before the Microsoft application says “Enough!” Inside one man’s brave journey to find out.  As Excel enthusiasts, we’ve all been in this scenario at some point: after working for hours on a large, complex set of data, it’s almost impossible not to add numbers to yet another row or column and ask yourself, “Does this Excel spreadsheet never end?” Thanks to Hunter Hobbs, we now know for sure. In a YouTube clip that quickly went viral early in the new year, the social media creator set himself up for what he described as “the dumbest challenge ever anyone had to do,” where he manually scrolled . . . and scrolled . . . and scrolled some more, until he nearly wore out his wrist and was kept conscious only by his trusty energy drink. The result? Nearly ten hours of labor, condensed into just a few minutes of video. Motherboard, the science and technology channel on Vice.com, pointed out that there is, in fact, more than one way to follow in Hobbs’ keystrokes: “Hobbs calls his feat the ‘Excel Challenge’, which entails little more than seeing how long it takes to reach an Excel spreadsheet’s 1,048,576th row. Hobbs already seemed to know that Excel spreadsheets had a finite number of rows ahead of time, and the exact number pops up in a number of tutorials and forums easily discoverable with Google,” Motherboard reported. “A quick search also reveals that all versions of Excel after 2007 support 16,384 columns, which should be a far more manageable Excel Challenge for anyone who’s particularly bored.” Those details may not be as important as the novelty of the stunt itself, which was noted by none other than Yahoo Sports: What we truly appreciate is Hobbs’ commitment to take us somewhere we’ve all gone in our imaginations every time we opened an Excel file but never had the wherewithal to continue scrolling our lives away to see with our own two eyes. What finance teams can do with Excel can be similarly illuminating, but with far less manual effort and far greater implications. Some so-called experts, for example, say Excel spreadsheets are considered limited in their ability to assist with sophisticated analytics. That’s demonstrably untrue, but we the business community needs a few more Hunter Hobbses to take the next step and push the capabilities of Excel spreadsheets, combined with cloud-based Corporate Performance Management tools (CPM), and show how far it can take a company in terms of its strategy. The best part? Hobbs has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that Excel spreadsheets do, in fact, come to an end, though the number is impressively large. What you can do with them as an enterprise platform, however, is infinite. The post The End of Excel Spreadsheets (It’s Not What You Think) appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

As a high school student trying to acquire job experience, I worked in a small family business with a long history and owned by a sweet married couple. The husband was in charge of operations and sales while the wife did the admin and accounting. Because the ledger system they had in place didn’t accommodate payroll finances, those numbers and calculations were handwritten in a notebook. There were frequent errors in tax calculations, remittances, and commission checks, mainly because the people around her couldn’t read her handwritten numbers.  When I came on board I introduced Excel and the number of errors dropped dramatically.  Ah, the birth of a new era. The Logical Choice for Tracking Numbers Excel is an easy and logical choice for tracking numbers. It’s low cost, flexible and has a variety of useful features and functionality. But things change when a company’s business requirements grow. For example, if: Your company operates in different countries, currency rates need to be saved and documented You have a large number of prepaid expenses, each one now needs to be tracked so that purchase orders can be generated on time You’ve introduced several revenue generation streams and now need to track each type of revenue for cash flow planning purposes From Spreadsheets to Patch Work This is where the patchwork comes in. Particularly if you’ve come to rely on Excel spreadsheets, the path of least resistance is often patchwork; whatever can be done to achieve the desired outcome as soon as possible. Why? Because accountants are often already working long hours, so generating something quick inside an Excel spreadsheet is typically the default method.  Unfortunately, patchwork solutions often neglect important factors including documentation, controls, validation rules and audit considerations. Sooner or later, companies find themselves juggling a myriad of uncontrolled spreadsheets and spreadsheet-dependent processes. Consider the following two scenarios: Employee turnover: We have all been there where we start a company and inherited spreadsheet processes without proper documentation. So it’s almost impossible to reverse engineer and make sense of the processes. Formulas may be in place but new employees have no insight into how they are derived.  Numbers can be wrong and users may have no idea why. A new organization is acquired: Your organization has its own forest of spreadsheets and now your organization has acquired another organization’s forest – unknown to your company, with different trees, different wildlife, with its own unique characteristics. Trying to marry two different sets of patchwork is a long and arduous process. Playing to Spreadsheet Strengths (Not Weaknesses) Some will argue that using spreadsheets is playing to their strengths. Accountants today are very savvy with Excel, capable of complex functionality and some even capable of writing code to automate certain processes.  But there comes a point where playing to a strength eventually becomes working around a weakness.  Why does that happen?  We do what we do because at the time there isn’t really an alternative. There are alternatives. Consider breathing new life into Excel by turning it into an enterprise-class platform. Look for a solution that combines: Building on your existing Excel processes by using a native Excel interface Features found in more formal finance and ERP systems such as controls, business rules, automation, version control, speed and accuracy Near the end of the Excel, patchwork lifecycle is when companies often start to shop and invest in an alternative. Be proactive and set your team up for success by anticipating future business requirements and inject proper systematic processes before your team gets into a state where every monthly process is a scramble to stay alive. And last but not least, embrace Excel by playing to its world-renowned strengths. The post The Excel Lifecycle: A Collection of Patch Work appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

A 2002 music video turned a spreadsheet into a chat app, but the real-life ingenuity is even more inspiring.  At long last, the mystery of Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s use of Excel spreadsheets has finally been solved. If you weren’t a fan of Nelly, a rapper best known for his hit single “Hot In Herre” in the early Aughts, you may not even be aware of a collaboration he did with Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland called “Dilemma,” much less the video that was produced to promote it. For those who saw it, however, there has always been one thing that didn’t seem to make any sense. Time magazine explains: In his 2002 video for the song “Dilemma,” his love interest Kelly Rowland contacts him using the decidedly labor-intensive method of texting in a method usually reserved for accountants’ files (a spreadsheet). Nelly, however, stands by his decision nearly 14 years later. During an interview with Australia’s The Project, he even defends it. “That was the thing at the time,” he said. “That was the new technology at the time. It looks a little dated now, I can see it.” Remember when Kelly Rowland texted her boyfriend via Microsoft Excel and got mad he didn't text back? pic.twitter.com/wmja5MehYC — FunnyPicsDepot(@FunnyPicsDepot) May 26, 2014   In fact, the use of Excel here doesn’t look dated so much as out of place, with the words “WHERE YOU AT? HOLLA WHEN YOU ARE FREE” appearing across a series of spreadsheet cells. On the other hand, Nelly’s video reflects how versatile Excel users have long seen the product — and how many continue to see it. Australia’s Pulse IT magazine, for example, recently came across an ingenious way of using Excel that could not only automate and make labour-intensive work more efficient, but potentially save lives. “A team from the Northern Territory’s Top En Health Service is using a clever, in-house designed system that combines reports from the pathology and prescribing databases in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, processes them through a series of rules and is then able to identify potentially life-threatening drug-bug or dose mismatches,” the article said. “The system is also capable of creating an individualized report for each prescriber showing them where or why things might have gone wrong.” At first, this might seem as incongruous as Nelly’s use of Excel. After all, aren’t spreadsheets routinely called cumbersome, antiquated and unfit for sophisticated analysis from all kinds of “experts?” Instead, Top En Health Service offers a good reminder that Excel can be a platform for innovation, speeding up decision-making and ultimately making better decisions. This is becoming even easier for areas like finance, sales and marketing organizations. The only dilemma is how quickly you can move to start enjoying the benefits. The post For Innovative Excel Users, There’s No Dilemma appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Spreadsheets are powerful and popular yet also problematic—but if you factor in what can be built on top of Excel, you’ll have found the secret to success.   With over 750 million users, Microsoft Excel is the weapon of choice for virtually everyone who wishes to present, analyze, and manipulate data. From the youngsters who already boast of being Excel champions—like Michael Kelly, an 18-year-old high-school student in Nebraska who recently became the 2016 National Champion of Microsoft Excel—to CFOs and CEOs, Excel is the go-to tool to make sense of numbers that could otherwise be confusing and unruly. Take Adam Goldstein, President and COO of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., who has used Excel to track the past 12 years of his personal and business life and find success. A story in the Wall Street Journal illustrates how essential the spreadsheet software is for data-driven individuals: “The key to having any sort of proper life management could only come through managing my personal and professional lives in an integrated way” … Familial accomplishments are recorded too, such as the first time his wife broke 90 in a golf game. He also records every workout in a separate spreadsheet. By filtering events based on their importance the spreadsheet stays uncluttered and Mr. Goldstein can get a quick view of whether he’s getting too busy or spending too much time on the road. He can also fit his days together “like an intricate puzzle.” That’s not to say, however, that Excel is without problems. A group of Melbourne-based researchers recently learned that the hard way, when they found that the spreadsheet software had automatically converted the names of certain genes into dates, making some of their findings obsolete and the task of fixing them significantly time-consuming: “One of the paper’s three researchers, Assam El-Osta, said the errors were found specifically on the supplemental data sheets of academic studies. He told the BBC that supplemental pages contained “important supporting data, rich with information,” and added that resolving these errors was “time-consuming” … The researchers claimed the problem is present in “approximately one-fifth of papers” that collated data in Excel documents.” These pains probably sound familiar to finance teams with a disproportionate amount of manual spreadsheet efforts that lead to errors, numbers that can’t be trusted, and time and resource wasting. But that’s when the best of both worlds approach of enterprise spreadsheets comes in. By offering the ease of use and flexibility that people like Goldstein can’t live without while overcoming inherent defects—such as inability to maintain data integrity, absence of workflow and process control and poor auditability—teams get to stay in the familiar world of Excel while doing away with all the pain. “Companies should investigate enterprise spreadsheet applications that can address desktop spreadsheet issues because they can provide better results, save an organization substantial amounts of time and provide greater accuracy and security,” writes Robert Kugel, Senior Vice President Research at Ventana Research. At the end of the day, it’s all about keeping the tool your team has grown to love while amplifying and adding controls to its power. The path to enhanced spreadsheets has never been clearer.

Clayton Christensen wants organizations to look beyond ratios. Excel, coupled with cloud-based CPM, is ready to help. If business leaders listen to anyone, they’ll listen to Clayton Christensen. Besides being a highly-respected business professor at Harvard University, Christensen is also widely considered among the first to use (and define) terms like “disruptive innovation” which are now bandied about everywhere in corporate circles. He co-wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, which showed just how hard it is to stay one step ahead of newer, nimbler competitors. This is a guy who knows what he’s talking about. Except maybe when it comes to spreadsheets. In a recent interview on Management Today, Christensen takes aim at Excel for causing many CFOs and the rest of business leadership teams from going astray in terms of strategy. “When [Excel] spreadsheets were developed in the 80s, it allowed analysts to start analyzing companies not on whole numbers but on ratios,” he tells the publication. “It causes businesses to manage by the balance sheet, rather than the income statement, and they’re not able to innovate.” That may or may not have been true in the 1980s, but with all due respect to Professor Christensen, it doesn’t reflect the wide range of ways in which Excel spreadsheets can be applied to decision-making today. The data in spreadsheets, particularly when coupled with corporate performance management tools and rendered in effective dashboards, is ideally designed for innovation, rather than something that inhibits it. If you want some inspiration for spreadsheet use cases, look no further than a man who helped steer one of the world’s largest software companies, as reported by Bloomberg: When not jumping around on the sidelines of Los Angeles Clippers games, former Microsoft Corp. chief executive officer (Steve Ballmer) has been spending his retirement on the inside of an Excel spreadsheet. Ballmer and a team of about 25 data geeks have been poring over more than three decades of government documents to create a comprehensive accounting of U.S. spending. The goal is to treat the nation like a company and create what Ballmer describes as a “10-K for the government,” like the one publicly traded businesses are required to file with regulators each year. Ballmer’s project may involve ratios too, of course, but Christensen’s point is to avoid short-term thinking when you’re looking at data. Excel doesn’t force anyone to do that, and in fact, can offer just the opposite today. Spreadsheets have already proven themselves a long-term solution – now we just need to apply them to some long-term thinking. The post Don’t Blame Spreadsheets for Short-Term Thinking appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.