From the blog: The joy of Excel

First, let me confess to being a bit of an anorak when it comes to spreadsheets. I started with Lotus 123 in 1985 on the IBM PC with the twin floppy drives. Then, after a brief flirtation with Multiplan, I started working through the various versions of MS Excel. It took a while to be convinced of the merits of the 2007 release, but now I find myself looking forward to getting my next laptop with Excel 2010 installed.

Of course, the reasons we use Excel are quite simple. It provides us with a framework for performing calculations and preparing analyses that is completely customisable. It even allows us to express - dare I say it - some degree of creativity in our daily lives.

Some of you may follow the excellent pointers and opinions on Excel offered by the ICAEW's Simon Hurst on its IT Faculty blog. There is a lot of discussion at the moment about the risks associated with companies' reliance on the output from spreadsheets. A glance at the 'horror stories' section of the EuSpRiG (the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group) can cause an FD to sleep less soundly at night.

I would like to offer a slightly different view of the limitations of Excel. I like to group these under the headings of capacity, reliability and transferability.

Capacity is when your spreadsheet runs out of steam. You have decided to do the entire budget on a single Excel file - sales by product/customer, purchasing/manufacturing and so on. A glance in My Documents confirms that the file size has ballooned to 27mb, takes seven minutes to run an F9 recalculation and, even zipped down, exceeds the email attachment limit on the mail server. Perhaps we are trying to get Excel to do something it just is not designed to do. Because Excel is so simple and intuitive to use, we want it to mirror, even sometimes replace, the accounting system, often because the accounting system itself is far from simple and intuitive to use.