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The show’s over, 5 reasons to bid Excel farewell

In 1985 when Queen were dominating the Live Aid stage, innocently oblivious to their supersonic 2019 rebirth, Excel was born to Mac. Baby Excel was as much out of this world as ‘Back to the Future’ and might have easily come out of Doc Brown’s lab. Here was piece of technology that could manipulate data and save hours; people fell in love with it instantly. It rocked the world and at the time no one thought it could ever be usurped as the accountant’s most valuable piece of software.

But times have changed and there’s a new love in our lives now. Don’t get jealous Excel, you’ll always have a place in our hearts. The new baby is both live and in the cloud; welcome Xero! .

Here are the 5 reasons why you must bid Excel a fond farewell.

1. Inefficiency
   With Excel, how often have you exported your results, pored over the spreadsheet, and realised you’ve made a mistake that you can no longer find? It makes your blood run cold. You know there must be a way out but the fear of duplicating the mistake stops you in your tracks. Throw in another team member’s careful editing of the same workbook, from a different location on a slightly younger piece of software. Honestly, it breaks your heart to witness it.       

2 Discrepancies
Slight discrepancies are big problems. Manual spreadsheets have the potential to be rapidly out of date and out of sync with your live data. Add the transference of manually uploaded data via simple copying and pasting to the mix and in comes the risk of mistakes occurring where pre-set formulas do not carry over. Also, it might seem like a good thing to be able to duplicate spreadsheets but it can mean that everyone is working from a different document, or a different incarnation of Excel. It’s enough to make you go grey overnight.

3.‘Glitch’ sounds like the baby of glitter and itch and it feels exactly like that when you encounter one in your spreadsheet. One persistent problem is when Excel disallows two documents with the same name to be opened, notwithstanding the fact that they have been saved in separate folders. You spend more time emailing colleagues to find out whether we should be using version 7.11 or 8.15. (Anyway, emailing colleagues, who still does that?)

4. Peril   Spreadsheets can be perilous. Reporting turns into a white knuckle ride if you have missed cells. Is anything right, apart from you looking like a nuffnuff? If you are the sort of trusting, kind person who believes in Excel, you could gloss over errors and be sitting on some very unreliable data. Glitches, bugs and discrepancies seem to have evolved for the sole purpose of keeping you awake at night worrying about your forecasts. But then again, some people do thrive on drama.

5. The present  Everyone expects everything NOW. Sorry but Excel templates don’t provide a platform for lots of people to work on the same document in the same time frame from different locations and different devices. Excel also can’t provide the beauty of ‘at-a-glance’ figures that cloud based technology like Futrli provides. Breathe out, sit back, and let add-ons like Futrli do it for you.

Excel? Why are we even discussing this? You’ve grown up and fled the nest and we’re now keeping the company of something that saves us time and energy. But it’s true we couldn’t take our eyes off you back when Queen gave the performance of their lives and you rocked the IT world.

Thanks for all the memories, you were great! Good night, Excel!