Excel is great at sums. The trouble starts when it runs the work

Open the spreadsheet that most of the work in your business goes through and look at the column where cells are coloured. Yellow means something is in progress, green means done, red means waiting for the customer. Someone introduced orange last winter and nobody is quite sure what it means now. That legend is written down nowhere, yet the whole business reads it every day.

A sheet like that does not cause trouble because it was built in Excel. It causes trouble because it has quietly turned from a tool for calculating into the system the business runs on, without anyone deciding it should.

Three jobs done by the same sheet

Look at what people actually do in Excel and you usually find three different things mixed up in one file:

• Sums. Pricing, margins, purchase plans, comparing quotes. This is what Excel was built for, and it is hard to beat.
• Lists. Customers, products, suppliers, equipment. Fine as long as one person keeps the list and everyone else only reads it.
• Workflow. Who picked up the order, how far it has got, what is waiting on whom and until when. This is where the sheet starts getting things wrong, quietly.

The sheet handles the first two jobs honestly. The third asks for something it does not have: knowing whose turn it is, and speaking up when something gets stuck.

Signs the sheet has become the workflow

Status is written in colour or in a comment

When a status is a colour rather than a value, it cannot be filtered, counted or checked. “How many orders are waiting for the customer?” turns into counting red cells, and everyone reads the colours slightly differently.

The deadline sits in a cell and warns nobody

A date typed into a sheet reminds no one on its own. Conditional formatting can turn an overdue date red, but only the person who opens the file and scrolls to that row will see it. A deadline nobody looked at passes without a trace, and you hear about it when the customer calls.

Formulas and sheets get locked so nobody breaks them

Hidden columns, protected sheets, a top row saying “DO NOT TOUCH”. That is a sign the spreadsheet is already being used as software, only without what software brings: a clear rule on who may change what, and a wrong entry rejected before it spoils everything else.

The sheet remembers the value, not the reason

Yesterday the quantity was 40, today it is 25. Even when you can see who last changed the file, you cannot see why the number moved: part of the goods came back, the customer cut the order, or someone typed into the wrong row. When the question comes up a month later, all that is left is someone’s memory.

If you recognised your own sheet in these, it does not mean you did anything wrong. The spreadsheet grew with the business step by step, because at every point it was the quickest way to get the work done.

What stays in Excel

Moving to a proper system does not mean Excel leaves the building. Sums stay in Excel: costings, plans, one-off analysis, what-if comparisons. For those, a spreadsheet is still the fastest tool, and nobody should have to give it up.

What moves is the workflow, together with the lists several people edit. They get a home of their own, and Excel goes back to what it does best. When something needs working out, the data is exported from the system into a sheet, worked on and reviewed, while the source stays untouched.

How to start without a big project

1. Pick one spreadsheet: the one the most people turn to during the day.
2. Write down the legend: what every colour, comment and abbreviation means. That alone often shows two people reading the same colour two different ways.
3. Turn the legend into a list of stages the work goes through, and for each stage note who moves it on.
4. Pull out every deadline in the sheet and decide, for each one, who should be reminded and when.

After those four steps you have a description of the workflow, written in the words of the people who do the work. It shows whether connecting a few steps is enough or the whole job needs covering, a difference we explain in the piece on one step, a connected flow and the whole job. Once the new system is live, the spreadsheet and the software should not run side by side for longer than necessary: people do not resist new software, they resist doing the job twice.

Show us the spreadsheet you suspect has been doing a system’s job for a while. Listing what gets copied through it by hand, and proposing one system in place of sheets and messages, is part of our business digitalisation and automation service, and the conversation starts with a message.