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Excel, fantastic

with 4 comments

One thing you’ll notice when you visit country offices and field sites is that everybody uses Excel for everything. Inventory? Excel. Fleet management? Excel. Health monitoring? Excel. This used to frustrate me – why the hell didn’t these people use Access, or maybe even a proper database?

Eventually I realised that they were right and I was wrong. Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful if they’re used properly – the problem is that people generally don’t use them properly, or at least effectively. Since people are already using Excel, why don’t we just get them to use it better?

An article in DM review shows exactly what could be done by Visualizing Spreadsheets.� It’s probably a bit beyond most of our staff right now, but the discussions we’re having at the Microsoft Certified Trainer Summit 2007 could give us some new training chops…

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Written by Paul Currion

January 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am

Posted in Databases,Software

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4 Responses to 'Excel, fantastic'

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  1. This short blog article by Joe Gregorio is quite illuminating about the reasons databases are not as popular as spreadsheets for joe worker:

    That’s why spreadsheets are so popular and why so many businesses are run on them. Each spreadsheet is a document. A document that has a name, an author, and is broken down into pages. Sure it does calculations and graphing and all sorts of other cool stuff, but the reason I crack open a spreadsheet long before I ever open a database is that the metaphor is more familiar, one that’s been ingrained in my psyche from childhood. The users aren’t stupid or wrong, it’s the database software that has a mismatch with their expectations.

    Tom Longley

    11 Jan 07 at 10:22

  2. My company usually help customers to build custom software that basically could do by Excel itself. However, an easy way to put the data online and work together at the same time is also a very important factor… which Excel lacks.

    Maybe some emerging online spreadsheet like EditGrid may help changing the whole thing?

    Tony

    11 Jan 07 at 20:40

  3. I agree with you to an extent, excel is a very useful tool, but it has its limitations.

    It is very easy to use. One can quickly create a Excel spreadsheet to start recording all sorts of information. And it is also very flexible – you can do a whole lot of different things with it.
    But with that flexibility comes a trade off – when you are looking at more complex sets of information, fleet management for instance, Excel becomes a whole lot more difficult to use than a well designed database. Excel isn’t designed to link different tables of data (Fuel consumption, for different months, for all the different vehicles). Often using Excel in this case will force people to have to enter information in more than one place, or create tricky links.
    Because Excel is so flexible, it is also harder to standardize data collection. There have been cases where I have sent out Excel sheets to different field sites to collect information, and they have come back with all sorts of formatting changed, extra column, comments etc, which has made it very hard to compile the information.

    However I think that Excel does serve a purpose. It is the first step in recording any sort of information on a computer. It is very good to use as a prototype, to sort out what information needs to be recorded, and to get people into the habit of recording information. I know from experience that it is a lot easier to implement a database in an office where the staff have already been using Excel. However I think that in too many cases humanitarian organizations do not get past the “emergency response” Excel solution and get to developing standard database solutions.

    What I do think is essential is training people to use Excel properly. Many users remain unaware of many features which could save them huge amounts of time. I am curious as to where there are simple training guides available for Excel (downloadable PowerPoint or similar – online guides would be a pain in field sites). Learning features like Formatting, Formulas (especially advanced ones like VLookup, Hlookup and If statements), Sorting, Pivot Tables and Macros would be a huge advantage for anyone having to handle data.

    Michael Howden

    6 Feb 07 at 22:36

  4. Michael – I couldn’t agree more. It’s the training that’s missing, as organisations assume that their staff know how to use Excel. In many cases, senior managers themselves have no idea what Excel is capable of, and therefore don’t even see the need for that support.

    On the training – we are putting together a package within the ECB ICT Skills Building project, that will include simple training for Excel and other desktop applications. Watch this space, as they say.

    Paul Currion

    15 Feb 07 at 10:50

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