10 Reasons Why You May Want to Ditch Your Spreadsheets

3. Using spreadsheets may cause you to have to duplicate data.

• Using custom software can eliminate the need to enter the same data into multiple places, which reduces redundancy, potential confusion and user error.
• Removing duplicate data also reduces your data footprint. This means that you’re not storing excessive amounts of data that could increase the impact in the event of a data breach or hack.

4. Extensive roles and permissions are essential to a user-friendly and safe environment.

• Custom software has the power to secure your data behind roles and permissions. This is a big limitation for spreadsheets and even some canned software. Having software developed gives you the ability to create permissions around every single piece of information and user type within your system.

5. Spreadsheets cannot offer a responsive or mobile-friendly interface.

• Custom software can be web-based (viewable in a browser), making it accessible everywhere, but at the same time more secure than spreadsheets or other internal software.

6. Spreadsheets cannot be branded and will always display your data in the same layout and format.

• Custom software can be easily branded to look like a product of your company with company color schemes and logos as well as integrated into your font-facing website.

7. Spreadsheets do not have an extensive plugin or add-on library that provides new ways to use your data.

• While Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have hundreds of functions in their library, most users will only be able to make use of about a hundred of these functions.

8. The Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel function library isn’t expanding.

• You can create amazing spreadsheets that perform many calculations that could be vital to you as a business owner; however, if you find yourself constantly increasing your reliance on spreadsheets, you may find that Google and Excel are no longer adding new features or functions at the pace you really need. With custom software, you’re only limited by your creativity and budget. Anything is possible when creating your own web application to handle your company’s data tasks.

9. Customizing multiple spreadsheets that carry similar functionality requires significant and redundant work.

• When you’re building a web application, you often build what we refer to as “reusable code.” This modular or component-based structure allows us developers to minimize the amount of code while making each piece of code available to every screen within the web application. When you’re working with multiple spreadsheets that contain the same or similar functionality, it becomes a terrible task when you need to make the same update to all of them. Imagine having 30 business-critical spreadsheets that have custom logic and functionality tied to different fields and then need to update each one individually with new logic or requirements. This creates an incredibly error-prone scenario.

10. Once you’re using multiple spreadsheets, it’s difficult to consolidate them.

• Once you’ve backed yourself in the corner of relying on multiple spreadsheets to run your data operations, it’s almost impossible to consolidate them down to a single spreadsheet. With custom web applications, we utilize databases and data stores such as MySQL, mSsql, MongoDB, PostgreSQL,and NoSQL to create, retrieve, update and delete data. This operation is known as CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete), and it is an essential part of data management. These databases carry specific data manipulation methods that cannot be mimicked with spreadsheets.