Are Spreadsheets really obsolete?
Data analytics is the rage in today’s age and for good measure — inferences and insights which just wouldn’t be possible using traditional methods are now becoming mainstream and critical to business processes. As a result, newer software such as Tableau, Power BI for rich visualizations & languages like Python (for newcomers like me) is quickly becoming the go-to solutions for many to get their hands dirty. But does this mean the humble Excel has met its end and it’s time to move on? Not quite.
Spreadsheets have an inherent simplicity that is hard to replicate. For bigger datasets, no doubt spreadsheets might not be the best solution but for smaller and medium scale usages, it’s hard to find an alternative that works just as well. And most of the time we are only scratching the surface in terms of capabilities and there is much more that spreadsheets have to offer than we realize. Case in point — me.
Like many others, I was gripped with the fever of learning Tableau as it was seen as an essential tool for making dashboards which can be thought of as being critical to informed decision making in managerial levels. And as the saying goes, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail — I tried using Tableau for every dashboarding & data analysis purpose that came my way. It was fun but didn’t seem like I was making full use of its capabilities.
Fast-forward to today to an experienced (albeit slightly) me. If you ask me now what to use for a situation that requires analysis of some data and my answer will be “it depends” (as cliché as it may sound, it truly is the answer). Does it involve thousands & thousands of rows of data, disparate & distinct datasets that need to be linked, need to be shared widely across users, required to be linked to live databases, hosted on servers etc., etc. — if answers to these are mostly yes then by all means, go for Tableau or Power BI (or any comparable package) — it might serve your purpose much much better. Does it mean that the same can’t be achieved using Excel? Not true for most cases but sure will be much more painful to do.
Which brings me to the question with which I started — are spreadsheets obsolete? Absolutely not. Only recently have I started delving into the world of macros & VBA and that has expanded my horizons immensely. The improvements in productivity possible can be immense and some tasks which might otherwise seem too cumbersome or complicated can be automated with much less human error. And by no means are these the exhaustive list of use cases — you might have your own. Try it and tell me how it goes! I see a lot of people asking what to learn while they wait out this lean period and every time I notice its all new-age software and the humble Excel is relegated in importance. It doesn’t have to be.
To conclude a lengthy and possibly preachy post — different problems will have different solutions and the biggest mistake we can do is to force-fit what we know into all of them. And this is true throughout life. Knowing what to use where is much more beneficial and helpful in the long run. If you must have a hammer, you might as well have multiple sizes in your arsenal and use the one most appropriate. And at the same time, evaluate whether you need a hammer at all.
