Spreadsheet

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.

Spreadsheets can be used as a glorified “boss button,” or they can be a catalyst for organizational growth. There are probably few closet CFOs in some organizations — those who secretly believe they could do a better job of taking financial information and other data to guide corporate strategy. Then there are the closet Excel users, who are different breed entirely. At one end of the spectrum are those who make use of Crash Planning, from a firm called Can’t You See I’m Busy. The Daily Dot recently listed Crash Planning in first place among apps that allow you to waste time at work without it being obvious to higher-ups. “Crash Planning is disguised as an Excel spreadsheet. You swap coloured planning blocks to make three or more combinations,” the story said. “If anyone (such as your boss) comes up behind you, you can hit the spacebar. This will pause “Crash Planning” and turn it into a blank spreadsheet. Very stealthy.” Maybe, but why not use real spreadsheets to do something useful — like Jack Busch does, for instance. Busch published a piece on GPost that goes into depth about Excel’s VLookup function, which he says helps him look really smart among his peers. Surprisingly, though, Busch writes that he likes to weave an air of mystery around his spreadsheet prowess: “If you work in an office doing menial number crunching on huge amounts of data, the biggest secret to success is becoming adept at Excel and not telling anyone. It’s what I do. Someone comes to my desk and says: “Hey, sorry to do this to you, but could you go through 2,000 rows of poorly formatted data and tell me which ones have been requisitioned but not shipped? I know it’s short notice, but could you have it done by Friday?” I act like it’s a huge pain, then I whip up an Excel formula that does it in five minutes by Monday afternoon then play Tetris until Friday.” This may not be entirely true, because Busch goes to great lengths to walk through how Vlookup has made a substantial difference in his ability to work with formulas and functions. It’s the kind of tribute to Excel that deserves to be shared widely, and not just by finance departments. Instead of using phony spreadsheets to goof off or using real Excel features to look like a guru, there’s a third option: use the technology to contribute to meaningful organizational change. There’s a lot more you can pair with Excel to do this, and when you do, you’ll want to do it in plain sight, because everyone will benefit. The post Excel Secrets That Aren’t Worth Keeping appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Microsoft has a fascinating new contest underway, but there’s something even more interesting going on in forward-thinking companies. When companies use the word “champion,” they’re not usually talking about someone who wins a competition so much as someone who puts their full support behind a project or initiative. Thanks to an upcoming opportunity from Microsoft, however, for Excel users the word could soon mean the same thing.  Back in the summer we wrote about the teenage winner of a U.S. National Champion of Microsoft Excel. Now, according to WinBeta, comes the Microsoft Excel World Championship, which will focus more specifically on those who have taken their spreadsheet skills to the next level. A blog post from the company says the global competition will start next month and go four rounds, into early 2017. The prizes will include not only the bragging rights but a chance to offer direct feedback on future versions of Excel by meeting product leads at its headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. “Overall, the competition is open to those around the world who have come to rely on Microsoft Excel each and every day,” the story said. “Entrants, nonetheless, will have to show skills and work through questions which focus on data management, data visualization, and formula management.” If this isn’t a clarion call to finance departments around the world, what is? Then again, finance departments are often already Excel “champions” in that other sense of the word. Despite repeated claims that spreadsheets are cumbersome, inefficient or error-prone, they consistently prove the naysayers wrong. The advent of cloud-based CPM has just given them more ammunition. It’s interesting, however, to imagine what the long-term impact of augmenting spreadsheets with more sophisticated back-end capabilities will mean for events like the Excel World Championships. For instance, a story on Digital Trends noted some of the specific hoops entrants will have to jump through: We’re also told that there will be categories such as data relays, where you’ll be accessing, structuring and manipulating data; chart gymnastics, which will involve visually representing data to best tell a story; and formula wrestling, which will have you dynamically solving questions even as the data changes. Some finance pros might argue they’re already running data relays today, but not to prove their lever of Excel expertise. Instead, they’re accessing structuring and manipulating data to deliver actionable insight rather than high-level reporting. When they’re doing chart gymnastics, they’re making financial information more accessible to other departments. And when they’re wrestling formulas, they’re showing that the future of the finance department is acting as a real-time problem-solver to the entire organization. Treating Excel as a platform might not be quite the same as winning the Excel World Championships — it could be even more rewarding.

Unusual use cases for products like Excel are just a good reminder of why users gravitate to real-time data collection and analysis. There are all kinds of reasons a company’s financial close might run a bit late – too many competing priorities, outdated processes, inadequate technology – but hopefully it’s not because the finance department is too busy playing Pokemon Go. For those who haven’t already gotten hooked, Pokemon Go is a game whereby people can use their smartphone to hunt for digital versions of the popular show characters in city streets or pretty much anywhere. As with any mobile game, there are plenty of people who want to claim bragging rights, as well as people who band together to improve their odds of success. What’s more unexpected is a key tool that some are using for this process: the same spreadsheet software beloved by finance departments the world over. A story on SegmentNext profiled how this approach is allowing some players to quantify combat points (CP) in Pokemon Go: A Reddit user named Carlitocarlin created a community-driven spreadsheet detailing how much a CP boost does a Pokemon gain after undergoing Pokemon Go Evolution. The reason as to why the spreadsheet is community-driven is once a user triggers Pokemon evolution, he/she submits the findings in a small questionaire which is then added to the spreadsheet. Since the findings are all community driven, the creator has also warned against potential trolls and has promised to keep on double-checking facts to prevent it. This is about as “real-time” as data gets, but it’s far from the only area where spreadsheets offer unique value. In fact, this was one of the key themes at a recent annual workshop that took place in Vienna. Called Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets, the event brought together academics to explore where products like Microsoft Excel could open up new fields of study and generate powerful insights. The conference offered a strong rebuke to anyone who suggests using spreadsheets leaves data static, trapped or irrelevant. Professor Felienne Hermans, head of the Spreadsheet Lab at Delft University of Technology, noted that the liveness and directness of spreadsheets makes them attractive to use,” as the Financial Times reported. “With spreadsheets, the results are instantly visible, or ‘live,’ as you change numbers or formulas. You also see ‘directly’ the entirety of the field of play — formulas, data, output — as you work. By contrast, when developing a website, there is distance between what is visible on the site and where you can edit the code that produces it.” The addition of enterprise-grade database capabilities will only build upon this foundation for those that want to take advantage of these benefits. Forget Pokemon Go – you can use your spreadsheets and get down to even more serious business. The post If Spreadsheets Can Help Win Pokemon Go, They Can Help Finance Teams Win Too appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.

Excel power users at different stages of their professional lives tend to sound much the same about their goals and approaches. It may be a little early to say for sure, but Michael Kelly sounds a lot like the next generation of finance professionals who could one day get the CFO’s job. He’s just proven he’s got one of the role’s most essential skills. 18-year-old Kelly is a high-school student in Nebraska who recently became the 2016 National Champion of Microsoft Excel in Orlando at the 15th annual Microsoft Office Specialist U.S. National Championship. Far beyond the spelling bees and debating competitions that are often a part of early academic life, Kelly and his rivals were given a number of challenging spreadsheet problems to solve, and he aced them. It’s actually worth reading ‘This Teen Knows More About Excel Than You Do About Anything,’ on the online publication The Ringer in its entirety, but the following exchange really stood out: Q: A wise colleague recently told me: “Don’t let anyone know you’re good at PowerPoint or you’ll be forced to make them for everyone for the rest of your life.” Are you at all worried about that for Excel? A: I don’t know. I’m not too worried. Excel isn’t the only thing I’m good at. I really don’t want to be tied into a job where all I do is enter stuff into Excel, but if I’m trying to figure something out or see what’s happening, I wouldn’t be opposed to whipping up a quick spreadsheet. That’s no problem. This is an interesting variation on a common theme you see in finance department circles, where Excel is sometimes presented as antiquated or something that CFOs and their teams should leave behind. Kelly’s response is a perfect example of not only why Excel is so compelling, but what the best and the brightest do with it: solve complex problems. For a sense of what an obsession with Excel looks like slightly later in life, check out this profile of Monica Williams on Geekwire. Williams is the CFO of Avvo, an online legal service directory firm, and she has no problem with wearing her love for a certain spreadsheet program with pride. (ie., when asked about her favourite app: “Excel, of course. Excel makes me happy.”). It was when she was asked about where she gets her best ideas, however, that the secrets of her success emerged: From talking with people. I love working in a collaborative setting and getting different perspectives. There’s always something I didn’t think of and that we can build on. Michael Kelly and Monica Williams may be at very different stages of their careers, but they share some really important traits: an open mind, a desire to be helpful and a bias towards using tools they trust to help people. Just more proof that those who love Excel . . . well, tend to excel. The post This is What Defines Excel Champions appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.