A red-eye espresso shot, please… Hell of a week!
A challenging phase is when your stakeholders anticipate your company to provide their monthly reports. With deep snoring, you scroll down the infinite sidebars of Google Analytics and other marketing channels, copying and pasting all those metrics into a manual spreadsheet. After assessing all the required information, you now have one hell of a task to format the data.
Ah! Isn’t it a nerve-wracking task?
Spreadsheets are broadly used for statistical analysis and while they’re enormously brilliant sources, they’re helpful only to a certain extent. Spreadsheets arent’s designed to perform beyond their capabilities. They can be risky at times.
As a convolution; when you consider a superficial review of your data, a spreadsheet can be sufficient. But if you expect to find some valuable information concerning your data or if want to perform a detailed analysis, a spreadsheet will not serve the functionality you require.
Yet another crucial factor to consider is the accuracy needed. Spreadsheet results can be shaky and unreliable when working on large datasets and/or carrying out complex calculations. If you desire accuracy, a spreadsheet won’t suffice your requirement.
This blog post represents a few points when a spreadsheet does not apply to your business.
1. Magnitude & Data Volume
You might resonate with Excel’s 65,000-row limit version before Excel 2002 and it enables more than one million rows today. However, it’s an old phenomenon and doesn’t apply at present.
As per reports, Excel’s size limitations led to an underreporting of about 16,000 cases of COVID-19 in 2020 in England. It’s a real-life illustration of how Excel can generate incomplete and poor data affecting people’s health. Using spreadsheets for data management and database can even be more dreadful for your business.
NOTE: Spreadsheets often come with some limitations and those limitations are not always visible.
2. Formula Credentials
Excel spreadsheets are recognized for reference cells in dynamic and static forms. If you never tried its ability to insert a row and column in excel, and your SEM or AVG formula failed to reference the data appropriately due to the absence of a new column or shifting down or right the complete reference, then you’ve probably failed to use the spreadsheet extensively.
However, it’s a primary cause of errors. If you overlook it in the initial stages, you’re likely to lose hours, maybe even work days. In worst cases, never noticed it and have managed it using deceptive and erroneous numbers.
3. Data Quality Issues
Individuals and professionals often use spreadsheets for data entry and workflow elements. Though spreadsheets are supported by data validation tools, identifying users around the dates, figures, and other primeval data types is the only basis. Most spreadsheet users often lack the proficiency to use spreadsheets optimally and end up with names, addresses, phone numbers, and other miscellaneous information in different formats.
Smartinfologiks – the best data analytics company in India states, that measuring inputs in spreadsheets is complicated. Spreadsheets are brilliant when you want to track data, graph simple trends, or create basic tools. But, they cannot be scaled. Once you think about input validation, user access control, or customization, you’re stuck PAL!
4. Spreadsheets are Prone to Errors
Spreadsheets are used extensively in manual processes, hence, errors arrive with copied and pasted cells, mistakes in formulas, additional rows and columns, etc. These all may contribute to erroneous outcomes. Analytics companies in India
Being one of the top analytics companies in India, we believe that manual processes including prosaic spreadsheets are responsible for expensive errors, disconnected data silos, and diminished productivity in each department.
The problem can even worsen with complex formulas, scripting, or other advanced techniques difficult to debug.
5. Spreadsheets are Time-Consuming and Exposed to Risks
Developing spreadsheets are often time-consuming, besides, defects and prospective issues, and can be difficult to maintain. Miss. Kshyana (Mita) Prava, CEO, and co-founder of Smartinfologiks states, “maintaining spreadsheets is a tiresome and time-consuming process leaving room for errors and mistakes. Spreadsheets not only cause human errors but also pave the way to an ample amount of time consumption that can be crucial for other respective tasks.
6. Spreadsheets Can Hamper Collaboration and Cause Data Silos
Companies often ask to email spreadsheet documents. Emailing documents is still in existence though employees can share access on OneDrive or Google Drive. A lot of individuals collaborating on a spreadsheet can be daunting and tricky. Who accessed the sheet and modified the data? How come the rows disappeared? Why did the formula change? Teams using spreadsheets can find it difficult to collaborate.
Spreadsheet collaboration also leads to data silos. When data analysts link to data sources, download the data, and create formulas, pivots, data operations, etc., they edifice an isolated and derived data source. Issues start occurring when other analysts access the same data and draft a duplicate derived data source.
The situation worsens when the employees share the spreadsheets with customers and shareholders who lack access to the corporate network.
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When you’re backed up by a cloud-based business intelligence tool, there’s no need to combine different CSVs, worry about the software crashing, or wait for a data analyst to answer your queries- also, you don’t need to know about SQL to access your data walls.
Ways Smartinfologiks Makes Business Intelligence & Data Analytics Seamless
- Governed Data
We ensure your data is secure and managed from a single point of contact. The data can be accessed securely and users are assigned respective roles and permissions.
- Immense Data Exploration & Speed
You can explore real-time data on a granular level devoid of any bars with our team of experts. Users can analyze billions of data rows swiftly and effortlessly.
- Alliance & Ad Hoc
Analyze data effortlessly between groups and crosswise departments without being anxious about version control. Our spreadsheet interface makes ceaseless ad hoc analytics possible and accessible to anyone.
- Risk-Free Data Extracts
After data extraction from a BI tool to a spreadsheet, the data team will lose visibility into how employees share and use the data.
Being one of the best business analytics companies in India, we enable data explorations and data-driven analysis scalable and quick. Business owners can effortlessly answer different ad hoc queries within minimal time without any technical help.
Still confused? Embrace self-service ad hoc analysis, visualizations, and BI dashboards with Smartinfologiks today! Schedule an appointment now +91 7400064691.
