A 2008 analysis of multiple studies suggests that 88 percent of Excel spreadsheets contain errors in their formula cells. “In large spreadsheets with thousands of formulas, there will be dozens of errors,” said Ray Panko, an IT management professor and expert on bad spreadsheet practices.
Multiply these errors by the close to one billion people worldwide who use Excel spreadsheets as a part of their work, and this becomes a problem of massive proportion. Microsoft Excel has become the go-to desktop program for running manual reports because it has long been deemed to easiest way for regular people to do the type of number crunching and report generating once reserved for statisticians, accountants, and other experts. Easy access and perceived simplicity have now contributed to the proliferation of Excel spreadsheet errors that researchers on multiple continents are now warning against.
The Third-party Solution
Many of our partners come from this Excel world, where their only option is spreadsheets. Reports were prone to error because they were coded by hand by an analyst and disseminated to executives and managers across the company. Reports could not be generated automatically, pulled directly from the information in their databases using a third-party tool.
Izenda is that third-party resolution. Many of our clients have used Excel because the applications they were using to manage information did not have an embedded tool to do it. Applications without built-in reporting tools provide less value to end-users, because they find themselves turning to their old friend, Microsoft Excel, to make sense of their data using a report drafted manually. This is time-consuming, not to mention laden with potential errors in mathematics, which could throw off the report’s conclusions and affect the bottom line.
With an embedded reporting platform, analysts can easily create reports that illustrate exactly what information they need to see, and executives and managers can use the data discovery tools to slice and dice the data as they need. Just in case they really want those Excel spreadsheets to stick around — because we know there are a few of you — there is an option in Izenda to export any report you are working on into an Excel spreadsheet. This automatically generated Excel document is far less likely to produce the errors rampant in reports created by the human hand.
