Excelitis

Whenever you ask someone about the best tool from Microsoft, she or he will answer “Excel”. And well … it´s a good tool. But it´s the most misused tool as well. Tools like spreadsheets were designed to do some calculations, to ease “what happens when this number changes”. What it really got? The “poor mans reporting tool”. By the time i heard many stories about many reporting spreadsheets in many companies: it´s the same everywhere. Whenever there is no official way to get reports, the manager sits down to his office and makes a reporting spreadsheet. And based on the Excel skills you get crappy to halfway descent Excel pseudo-forms. But does it really solve the problem? Once every reporting interval the manager gets a swarm of excel file to consolidate, no plausibility checks, no real version control , error-prone and when you are out of luck, it´s possible that one of your reports modified the spreadsheet in a subtle way, and simple copy and paste is gone to limbo. Reporting is by definition a bottom-top approch, it´s centralized. With every iteration of reporting you get a more condensed view. Thus other technologies like yet another spreadsheet comes into mind. Setting up a webform with database as a storage backend got really easy with tools like Ruby on Rails or the likes. It may be a little bit harder to set up a reporting (but this is only a matter of tools or some part-time job students) but you get a centralized store for the reporting, centralized plausibility controls (perhaps even with such nifty things like a check against your customer database). And even when the manager can´t do it on it´s own, it may have a positive side effect: The question “Do i really need this report?” will be asked more often. My plea is to get rid of Excel as a reporting tool, it´s the dumbest choice to do reporting. We are in 2007 … time to start the use of some modern technologies …