In this Big Data era, many companies deal with storing data on Spreadsheets and Excel sheets to make the process easier.
According to Forbes, studies suggest that 1 in 5 businesses are using spreadsheets as the main tool to communicate data internally.
Spreadsheets definitely are the best tools within a business but data visualization and communication make exceptions.
Similar to many businesses, IT teams use the spreadsheets to store and access data as well. But since the IT teams are more prone to cyber threats that include the threat of reputation and financial damage, they started using Asset management software.
However, that had not always been the case.
Many companies still use spreadsheets for managing IT assets.
Benefits of Using Spreadsheets
Cost Effective
Spreadsheets are basically free. This can be advantages to many companies as they could use the capital on other assets of the company.
This is especially good for small businesses because they are usually less on budget.
Easily Adaptable
The main advantage of a spreadsheet is that anyone can figure out how to use it without any specialized training.
Employers need not worry about training their asset monitor to handle the spreadsheet. Even if the current monitor resigned his job, they could easily replace them without second thoughts.
Customized Variables and Formulas
Spreadsheets also come in with in-built customized mathematical formula support.
Users can put in the formulae in the search bar and the spreadsheet will do the rest in an easier and efficient way.
Even though Spreadsheets have advantages in its package, most companies are still advised to not use them because:
Important Data is Hidden
Because you see all the raw data at once, it is difficult to interpret the important data.
Visualization tools help in that matter of surfing through the data and finding the correct information. But spreadsheets make it fairly difficult to find necessary data in record time.
If it is time-consuming, you are clearly losing the point there.
Spreadsheets fail to keep tracks of workforce changes
As the company gets bigger, one can also reasonably expect its employee turnover to rise as well. Spreadsheet is used to keep track of who your current employees are. But using spreadsheets to constantly monitor which particular computers or devices are being used by which particular employees, is a little difficult.
A spreadsheet system will become mostly chaotic in some cases. For example, when an employee starts working for a company, the spreadsheet has to be updated, with his name entered in hardware or software asset assigned to him.
When this employee eventually leaves the company in the future, everything has to be undone. After reopening the old spreadsheets, one must search which hardware or software assets contain his name so that they may be retrieved from the employee before erasing his name from the spreadsheet.
This process could turn out to be extremely gruelling when applied to every movement in your workforce.
Loss of historical data
Spreadsheets aren’t designed to store historical data. So in an attempt to keep the size of them manageable, they are updated and companies lose their historical data.
This makes is hard or impossible to spot trends over time and compare data across longer time horizons.
Cloud assets are very difficult to manage with spreadsheets
IT applications have changed through time from server based model to instance-based model, due to Cloud and SaaS. Spreadsheets are adapted to include changes on how businesses record software usage in the cloud, since they deal with static data.
One of these changes that can’t be reflected in a spreadsheet is the use of cloud computing. Some IT assets these days are already in the cloud, a place where spreadsheets just can’t reach and where asset usage is on a per-instance basis. Given the changing parameters of IT assets, the only way for companies to manage their cloud-based assets is to use an IT Asset Management Software.
It’s difficult to share
Even with cloud computing solutions, spreadsheets are difficult to share among the team members. Also there is a possibility that data could accidentally be edited, deleted or changed, the spreadsheet is rarely shared in real-time.
Even if the spreadsheet is shared to the team members, it might be emailed once in a week. However, there are chances that the spreadsheet might get drowned in the sea of messages in the employee inboxes.
Human errors are difficult to spot in spreadsheets.
There is a lot of chance that simple mistakes errors can easily make their way into a spreadsheet. Since, everyone with access to the sheet can also change its data; it’s even harder to pinpoint who made the mistake. In fact, according to Forbes, it is concluded that 88 percent of spreadsheets actually contain errors.
Furthermore, not all users of the software have authorization to meddle with the data. Not everyone can change or modify the data, but only those responsible for keeping them as accurate as possible.
Conclusion
Even though spreadsheets are the easiest form for communicating within the business company, it bears several loopholes.
It is suggested to not use spreadsheets as the medium to data communication and data visualization since there can be more drawback than advantages of the spreadsheets.
