Outgrowing Excel
Excel Hell?
Those of you who follow our Twitter feed could be forgiven for thinking that we are waging a war on Excel. I guess in some ways we are, although it’s really more about highlighting some of the difficulties and risks associated with using Excel to run your business. Our experience is that over time, spreadsheets that began as a few rows and columns tend to grow and evolve and take on of a life of their own.
A Muddle in the Making
The challenges tend to come when the information being stored needs to be viewed, edited and added to by other people. I’m sure it’s not just me who feels the need to append my initials and/or the date to a file name when I resave a shared document. Either way the result is multiple versions of the same document with it soon becoming unclear which is the current working document. Add into the mix emailing the spreadsheet to people outside of the organisation and you can soon get in quite a muddle, not to mention introducing significant risks in relation to data protection.
All Organisations Effected
It is interesting to see that this challenge is the same whatever the size of the organisation – you may be an SME with just a few employees or a large multinational.
So why is this such a widespread challenge? I think the answer is simply that it’s easy to start keeping track of information using the likes of Excel. Given that the vast majority of us use MS Office every day, essentially it’s ‘free’ as we already have access to it.
Alternatives to Excel
And what are the alternatives? The more industrious of us will have a bash at creating an MS Access database if it came with MS Office. Or maybe we’ll try using a combination of ACT! and Sage if the challenge is around CRM and accounting. Of course there are very comprehensive cloud based solutions out there such as Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM which are incredibly powerful tools. But all these alternatives require a huge amount of time and energy to get started, set up and may well not be affordable. They may also lack the flexibility that many businesses require. And that’s why we’ve developed an alternative for the rest of us.
A Simpler Solution
Qton is responding to these challenges. We’ve developed the perfect Excel upgrade. It is a business management tool which has the flexibility your organisation needs. It is powerful enough to give immediate advantage over companies still grinding away with Excel. It is built just for you – a bespoke online database, available anywhere, always current, always in sync, perfectly suited to the business needs you have.
Qton’s Excel Challenge
So why not take us up on our Excel challenge? Send us a copy of your Excel spreadsheet and we will build you a demo online database free for the first 30 days. Zero hassle and it has to be worth a try! If you wish to continue using it there will be a small monthly fee or you can walk away.
Email Us! contact@qton.com
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