They’ve been around for ever, you can use almost any equation in them, and they are adaptable…..That’s right, I’m talking about the dreaded SPREADSHEET!
You can categorize your entire life and business with these things! It’s relatively easy to learn. You can do a lot of things with a spreadsheet but is it really efficient? Not only does it take a long time to initially set up the spreadsheet with all of the equations you need and enter all of your data into it, but you also have to have multiple people enter and re-enter all the data into multiple spreadsheets every time you have new data to put into them.
Things that make you cringe about spreadsheets:
- spreadsheets start small and you think they are organized but then they grow and get out of control
- What can seem organized to one person makes absolutely no sense to another person
- Too easy to change, anyone could do something to it
- Hard to know which copy is up to date
- It doesn’t integrate with accounting software
- You have easily spent $10-20 thousand dollars in man hours to keep them up to date
So I’ve put together a little list “ You know you’ve gone to far with spreadsheets when…”
…it takes 100 pages to print out one spreadsheet,
…you have to scroll down your spreadsheet for 2 min to find what you’re looking for,
…you realize you have 100 spreadsheets that you haven’t used in a year,
…you’re having a conversation with your spreadsheet that are mainly made up of 4 letter words,
…you can’t sleep because you’re sleeping about spreadsheets,
…you think a great xmas present is buying the newest version of Excel,
….you start thinking you need glasses because you’ve been staring at spreadsheets for too long
feel free to add to the list…