When a company decides to rely on business analytics techniques, the first thought immediately runs to the tools we have all used more or less often in our professional lives: office program suites, particularly spreadsheets. However, the limitations, technical and operational, imposed by these tools soon become blockers for business intelligence activities. Let’s look at the main limitations of traditional spreadsheet applications, e.g., Microsoft Excel, and why it is necessary to switch to more advanced solutions.
Dashboards are today’s reporting tool
To understand the limitations of spreadsheets in business analytics, we need to start with an assumption, which is one of the foundations of the transformation into a data-driven enterprise: in order to be useful, data cannot just be read, but must be presented in a quickly understandable form, so that it can be analyzed and studied in an agile way even by those who do not have a strictly IT background.
In this context, the tool of choice for any modern data-driven approach is the dashboards, whose job is precisely to provide a faster and more intuitive reading of data, and above all, updated in real time. This is where spreadsheets show their main weaknesses, precisely because they were conceived as local processing tools and only later adapted to different uses. Here are what are the main limitations still found in the use of these solutions.
External data management is laborious
If a local application is used, for any kind of analysis the data must exist within the program itself. This means that, for any kind of processing, they must be imported. Which brings with it both a strictly operational problem, where they need to be consolidated, and a problem with updates, since solutions for connecting spreadsheets to external sources updated in real time are laborious and vulnerable to errors. Sure, there are tools to mitigate these issues, and Cloud counterparts are often more flexible. But you end up investing more resources in fixes and workarounds than would be required by a structured solution.
Collaboration is limited and version control is complicated
Even without going to the now-anachronistic extreme of local files shared via email or network shares by those who processed them, the collaboration tools offered by even the most advanced office tools, such as Office 365, are not designed for the kind of collaboration needed in business analytics.
Trivially because it is not possible, short of very complex solutions, to thoroughly manage differentiated access and editing privileges, with the risk of less experienced users compromising the team’s work.
Customization is limited
As much as the effort of developers is always aimed at improving the tools even from the point of view of customization options, Excel and other spreadsheets still have many limitations in formatting charts and advanced presentation tools. Creating a dashboard that adapts 100% to the needs of a real business intelligence activity requires many hours of work, often to be repeated before each data presentation session.
Advanced analysis tools to overcome limitations
Whether it is business intelligence or any other type of advanced data analysis, spreadsheets present the side very quickly. Both because of the limitations mentioned above, and because of a much simpler set of technical limitations. For example, the available formulas do not always provide adequate capacity, or there are no error control and management systems in place. But even further upstream, spreadsheets are often insufficient to handle the amount of data coming from a company that wants to implement substantial control systems (Excel’s number of rows, for example, is limited to 1,048,576, a number that is only seemingly considerable).
For this reason, companies that intend to move toward more analytical management and data-driven need to rely on more advanced tools, for example the SAP’s business analytics tool. The offering includes tools and solutions for any need and any type of business, from single-site manufacturing to entreprises.
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