Why an Over-Reliance on Microsoft Excel Could Be Limiting Your Business

By Tracey Shirtcliff, founder and CEO of SCOPE Better, the Pricing Platform designed for professional services.

For 40 years now, Microsoft Excel has dominated the business software market. Born of the era of shoulder pads and power suits, it transformed the way that many companies operated. Offering a comparatively simple interface, it opened the door to quick complex calculations, supporting the easy visualisation of data in previously unimagined ways, rapidly becoming the standard across all sectors of business. For that, it remains iconic. However, just because something is iconic, doesn’t mean that it’s infallible.

Throughout the years, Excel has quietly evolved. The clunky text and boxy design has been upgraded, new features have been added, and the functionality has increased – but it hasn’t developed quite enough. While the tool has tried to keep pace with both technology and the demands of business, more powerful alternatives have come into play, leaving it redundant in multiple use cases. So, why are so many businesses so intent on sticking with Excel?

Why is Excel still so widely used?

Ten years ago, a viable answer to that question might have been because it’s versatile. Or maybe because Excel integrates so easily with the other Microsoft tools, which most businesses use. It may even have been because it supports high levels of customisation. All of these answers remain more or less true today, but if we’re honest, there are other programmes that do most of those things better.and The real reason why Excel remains so prevalent is because it’s familiar. Most of us learnt how to use it at school. Kids, arre still being shown how to make graphs on it in their IT lessons. We’re as familiar with Excel as we are with Word – because it’s the default opening programme for many file types and operating systems, so we don’t even question why we’re using it. Even though most of us don’t know it well enough to maximise its potential, because after all, who can remember the 200+ keyboard shortcuts you need to know to do that!

Whilst Excel might be so familiar as to be ingrained within the public consciousness, it’s not just not scalable for businesses. So, with so many powerful tools now available to support most business needs, isn’t it time for businesses to look beyond the familiar?

Where is Excel being outperformed?

Collaboration

Contemporary business is all about collaboration. Whether you’re office-based, working from home, or outsourcing key tasks to freelancers, the chances are that you’ll now rely upon collaborative processes, which simply aren’t compatible with Excel’s single-user design. Despite the fact that Excel is now ostensibly cloud-based. Why? Because in Microsoft’s haste to contemporise Excel, it simply took Excel’s existing framework and overlaid it with cloud-based collaboration functionality. Leaving the door open to version confusion, user glitches, and a range of functionality flaws.

Newer spreadsheet tools and cloud-based platforms are typically built with real-time collaboration between multiple users in mind, removing the difficulties Excel users experience on a regular basis.

Advanced analytics

Thanks to GenAI, businesses now have the power to instantly gather and analyse unimaginably large pools of data. With just a couple of clicks, they can turn that data into highly complex visualisations. And they can do that without the user needing to know the 100+ character long formulas necessary to create poor imitations of the same in an Excel file.

Scalability

As for managing those vast datasets now accessible to businesses, that’s not what Excel was designed for. When Excel was developed, data was precious because there was little of it. Now, businesses can access what often seems like excessive data pools, and these pools are only going to deepen as AI becomes more widely used. This means  that the processing lags and crashes already commonly experienced by Excel users when working with large datasets are only going to get worse. Most contemporary alternatives were devised with the potential of AI in mind.

Data security and control

Data security is another area in which Excel is truly showing its age. 40 years ago, security was often more of an afterthought than a core business focus. You were no more likely to password protect an Excel document than you were to worry about taking liquids on a plane. Now, it’s common practice for businesses to provide compulsory training that warns of the dangers of information being passed around casually on Excel files.

More recently developed tools are designed to give users more granular control over data and a much greater level of data security. Who can view it, edit it, or share it. They have role-based permissions systems inbuilt, with complex firewalls and security protections supporting automatic data backup.

Integrations and connectivity

Excel’s simple compatibility with other Microsoft tools has always been one of its key selling points. The problem is that not all business processes can now be dealt with exclusively through Microsoft, and it’s not so easy to integrate Excel with other systems. The average company’s tech stack has grown exponentially in recent years, and they need all of those tools – CRMs, marketing platforms, pricing platforms, and accounting software – to talk to each other, often in real time. Excel makes that extremely difficuly and sometimes impossible in many use cases.Most modern tools are designed to enhance connectivity, integration, and customisation, helping businesses to achieve their goals as simply, effectively, and quickly as possible. 

User Experience

Excel was revolutionary in the 1980s, but its basic interface hasn’t changed much since. It relies on drop downs, tabs, and hotkeys – backed up by in-depth user knowledge.

Today’s alternatives aren’t just more visually appealing,they’re significantly more intuitive, making them faster and easier to use, particularly for non-technical users. This means that when your teams are seeking support for pricing, customer service, or anything else, they can access the data they need rapidly, without having to stop and think through each step of the process.

There’s no denying that Excel was extraordinary in its day. It laid the foundations for all contemporary alternatives to build upon. But it simply has not kept pace with emerging technology and the evolving needs of contemporary business. It’s clunky, it’s time-consuming, it lacks the intuitive interface that the modern workforce demands. And yet so many businesses cleave to it, reluctant to relinquish the familiarity that is slowly limiting their potential, preventing them from accessing the flexibility, scalability, security, and easy collaboration that they need to thrive.

I could be wrong. Maybe Excel provides absolutely everything your business needs to grow and compete with everyone else on the market. But are you confident enough in Excel’s abilities to totally ignore the potential of alternatives? There are purpose-built tools suited to modern workflows and modern demands, that offer better security, simpler interfaces, and endless connectivity. There’s as much value in familiarity as there is in loyalty – but sometimes you have to know when to call it a day. So, is it time for your business to begin exploring alternative solutions?