Eugene Lebedev is a Power BI consultant by background. Before founding Vidi Corp in 2021 he created Power BI reporting for Autodesk. His Power Bi reports were used by VPs of Finance and C-suite of Autodesk. As part of Vidi Corp, Eugene created dashboards for Google, Teleperformance, Delta Airlines and 200+ clients worldwide.
More than half a billion users across the world pivot on Spreadsheets to store their data. As days move on now, there are a wide variety of spreadsheets available in the market, such as Microsoft Excel sheets, Google sheets, Zoho sheets, Airtable, and many more, but still, Microsoft’s Excel is leading the market, followed by Google sheets. No doubt that spreadsheets are an excellent source for storing, viewing, and managing data, but they have their limitations in their ways. Forget gigabytes; according to the IDC group, the size of the data we generate annually will reach 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes). The size of data is tremendously increasing over the past years, and a considerable amount of data is being neglected or not analyzed. So, here comes the question ‘ how to use your data the most?’
The more a company grows, the more it generates data. Despite their strengths, Spreadsheets don’t always provide every solution you need. With an increasing wave of data sources, managing spreadsheets becomes difficult and complicated to visualize. If you own a small business, then spreadsheets might serve your purpose, but you definitely need technology beyond a spreadsheet if you own a growing business. That technology is known as Business Intelligence.
In this blog, we will discuss some reasons why spreadsheets are insufficient as a data analytics solution on their own and at what stage you should switch away from spreadsheets to BI reports.
Sometimes spreadsheets may not be the most appropriate solution :
1. Spreadsheets are prone to errors.
According to research done by the University of Hawaii, 88% of spreadsheets contain some type of error. One in every five companies suffers huge losses due to human errors on Spreadsheets.
2. Time-consuming
The time required to make sure your data is completely error-free isn’t practical in many companies in today’s fast-paced business world. Creating, manipulating, verifying, integrating, updating, and merging data into spreadsheets is often a full-time job. This time might be better spent on tasks to grow your company.
3. No connection of data sources
There are no in-built direct data connectors available from spreadsheets to connect data sources. However, there are plugins that make it possible to connect to data sources but those do not cover a lot of data sources. They also often require a subscription
4. Hard to scale
Once your business and your customers’ data start growing, then spreadsheets will need to as well. However, the larger the spreadsheet, the more likely it is prone to contain errors and broken formulas, which in turn leads to decreased trust in the data and more manual effort for data processing.
5. Loading time
The larger the spreadsheet, the larger the problems and the most common one is loading time. Spreadsheets take more time to open and fetch the data when they are of considerable size, resulting in a lot of time loss.
6. Multiple versions of the truth
There’s no clear indication of who’s working on what and when resulting in data redundancy. Also, Every time someone changes the master spreadsheet, they’ll need to upload it to a central repository for the edits to be communicated to the rest of the team. If they forget to update it, then there will be multiple versions of the same spreadsheets.
7. Advanced use of spreadsheets requires expertise.
Most spreadsheet users can perform simple tasks and functions such as “sum” and “sort.” But most users find it challenging to create complex operations such as joins, pivot tables, charts, etc. Therefore, an analysis of complex data in spreadsheets requires much more expertise, and it may require an additional hire and cost.
8. Risk involved
While data security on external data sources is very effective, security is gone once data is exported to a spreadsheet because they do not have robust access controls. Spreadsheets are often downloaded onto individual computers and then shared through email; they can be easily prone to security risks.
If you have followed us right from the start, then you would have realized by now that spreadsheets are limited to themselves in terms of functionality and scalability, and if you remember, then we posed a question ‘how to use your data the most?’ Well, we already answered it by ad hoc use of Business Intelligence tools.
BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, Domo, Google Data Studio can integrate all your data into a single place, blend different data sources, and ensure that all the information is automatically updated. The underlying data can quickly be reviewed from a variety of perspectives to make sure that nothing is missed in any means.
To see how you can optimise your reporting with Power BI, make an enquiry here.
To have a smooth and steady transformation of complex data into knowledge, we need tools with a broader scope. This is where business intelligence tools come in. BI software streamlines data collection, automatically analyses complex data sets, provides visuals of the business performance, and gives users actionable insights. With access to these actionable data, decision-makers are able to identify new opportunities, tap new markets, streamline operations, enhance sales, support company growth and help their business gain a competitive advantage.
” Things which can be done on spreadsheets can be done Better and Beyond with BI.”
1. Huge capacity
Old-school spreadsheets are very slow when it comes to opening large data files. Few programs do not even allow loading or viewing datasets bigger than a mentioned number of rows or megabytes.
In contrast, Business Intelligence tools handle millions of rows of data allocation in addition to analysis and visualization functions. BI tools are snappy and fast. With them, you may work and view your data directly in the BI system, which gives users more flexibility and reduces the extra burden. Moreover, with modern BI tools, you can easily combine, concatenate, and merge various datasets irrespective of size, even those from different departments like sales, marketing, etc.
2. Data connectivity
Traditional spreadsheet handlers are ready to create, copy, and paste data tables easily. However, they don’t allow connecting to other tools like Twitter, Facebook, or Google Analytics. To hook these up, old-fashioned programs often require third-party plugins. Connecting data sources from different sources like SAP or SQL Server also can be problematic for old-school spreadsheet software.
In contrast, Modern BI tools come with built-in data connectors, which help to connect a wide variety of data sources from almost all different sources just within a click. These tools are designed to combine data into a reportable model with connector functions dedicated to delivering Interactive dashboards and instant visualizations. They offer seamless and rich connectivity functions within minutes.
3. Automation of report creation
BI tools enable automatic data consolidation from various sources through their highly sophisticated data connectors periodically. Moreover, they’re capable of automated data collection and permits for scheduled data refreshes, making manual processing obsolete and unnecessary. Therefore, they make business users’ time to be put forwards toward more valuable activities.
This BI-enabled automation adds value in two ways. First of all, these systems are less susceptible to mistakes as they require far less manual, human involvement. Second, reporting is automated, in which you can create scheduled strategic reports and always ensure that your clients receive up to date critical information.
4. Rich Visualisation
There’s no doubt that Spreadsheets come with simple data visualizations, but as long as workflow increases, the complexity of data visualizations also increases, making Spreadsheets incapable of visualization.
In contrast, complex visualizations involving geodata, maps, and timeframes are often within the standard features of many BI tools. Moreover, Some BI tools even allow its users to customize their visualizations to satisfy unique requirements. In a sense more power in your hands
5. Mobility
Using Excel or other traditional Spreadsheets on mobile devices is quite difficult, ineffective, and sometimes irritable to view. Monitoring KPIs in mobile BI dashboards may be a far better solution than viewing and visualizing on spreadsheets. Moreover, mobile versions of BI tools often preserve most desktop functionalities around the analysis and statistical reports. Some BI solutions have dedicated mobile apps with access to downloadable dashboards for offline work giving you wings to access from anywhere.
6. Easy Collaboration
We all know how pathetic and irritating it is to work on a spreadsheet simultaneously with colleagues; in fact, it confuses employees as they don’t have any defined roles to work on them directly.
In contrast, BI tools allow you to publish reports that are accessible to your collaborators, and they can work or comment on your KPIs and visualizations based on the context of roles defined. However, each aspect of the report is often adjustable and can be viewed and updated in real-time in each collaborator’s personal workspace. Role-based collaborations make employees understand their individual work and their teammates’ roles more accurately.
7. Cloud-based solutions
Almost all BI tools are running on the cloud ecosystem to make sure its users have the right to access their reports and analytics over the comfort of the internet, and with this, you no longer need to upload your files to drive so that others can access. Everything happens in real-time, and there is no need to worry about storage space, thanks to the cloud ecosystem capable of handling data no matter how huge and complex. Cloud BI solutions are typically adjusted for millions of rows of data and run their own memory load optimization engines to ensure the speed of loading and viewing time.
8. Security on top
Standard spreadsheets do not have their own security gateways. They simply rely on operating systems, network file access rights, and individual computers’ security. Even so-called password-protected files can also be tapped, resulting in confidential data of your organization.
In contrast, BI software solutions have many security layers for controlling and monitoring users’ activity and access rights. By far, it is simple to implement security protocols like LDAP or Active Directory authentication to ensure max security. The owner of a dashboard or dataset can give access to relevant people to specific information in a report based on their level of expertise or responsibilities in an organization.
Today’s data-driven businesses require new solutions to reduce the overburden on their IT departments with gathering, preprocessing, and analyzing data, and this can be easily achieved by the inclusion of BI tools in your business. BI tools automate a variety of business processes and facilitate the merging of data from various sources. It also offers eye-catching visualization capabilities and futuristic high-level security. However, to enjoy all these benefits of BI tools, you also need the right BI team or a great BI agency.
Save yourself time and stress and start your BI journey with Vidi-corp, one of the top BI analytics agencies based in the UK. We work in BI tools to answer business questions from data for our allied clients, and we specialize in empowering them to make better use of their data to make wise business decisions. Our BI strategies helped our clients reach new heights and expand their business beyond horizons.
Need effective business data analyst & visualization services, then look no further vidi-corp is here to help you. Contact us today to know how we can help you achieve a BI driven ecosystem in your business.
