Excel is a powerful tool. It is both easy to learn and rich in functionality, and it handles a wide range of tasks well. Many businesses use it for everything, often creating a giant spreadsheet on which the entire organisation depends. This may work while a company is small and moving quickly, but the spreadsheet can soon become a bottleneck.
The Mega-Sheet
I recently came across a surprisingly large company still using a mega-sheet. It covered the following roles:
- Database.
- Data quality tool.
- Dashboard.
- Customer payment tracker.
- Sales tracker.
It is easy to see how this happens. You start with a simple data tracker. Once the data becomes important, you create processes to ensure that it remains accurate. Because all the data is of good quality and held in one place, it then seems logical to use the spreadsheet to drive everything else. However, this organic growth makes the system brittle, difficult to modify, and resistant to automation or improvement. Even working within its existing limits becomes difficult because formulas and macros can take hours to finish updating.
This article explains how to move away from this kind of system in manageable steps without disrupting your current workflow.
Solving the Root Problem
The main reason this happens is that Excel is used as a database. It can work with small amounts of data, but, as you might expect, a purpose-built database works better. The first step is therefore to transfer the data into a database. Larger companies may choose Salesforce, but many other options are available. PostgreSQL, for example, is free and widely used for many kinds of tasks.
The first task is to design a process that keeps the database updated while it operates in parallel with the Excel spreadsheet. Ideally, the database should be the primary system to update, with new entries pulled from it into the spreadsheet. You can then perform a bulk transfer of the existing spreadsheet data to establish a known good state in the database and maintain it from that point onwards. This sequence matters: if you upload the data without a plan for keeping it current, it will quickly become outdated and people will stop trusting it.
Maintaining Business Continuity
It is important to remember that many key business processes will continue to rely on the Excel spreadsheet during the migration. The first step is therefore to maintain both systems in parallel, as described in the previous section. The second is to generate the Excel file from the database. Once all the data is present in the database, you can run a query to create a copy of the mega-sheet automatically. This generated file acts as a bridge for the tasks that still depend on it, allowing you to stop maintaining the old file manually.
Moving Reliant Tasks to Appropriate Tools
Once the business is in a stable state, the remaining tasks can be migrated to more appropriate tools and automated one at a time. For example, n8n, a low-code automation tool, can run data-quality checks on deal terms by using AI to review a contract whenever a new entry is added. Many dashboard tools can also connect directly to the database, providing live updates.
If this problem seems familiar to you, get in touch. You don’t need to buy expensive enterprise tools to fix it, free open-source tools exist that can do it all for you. The only needed fee is the labour cost (yours or your contractor).
