I’m a big spreadsheets guy. Excel and Google Sheets are my go-to applications for some quick number crunching. But I’ll admit, I’m not super organized in these. Usually it’s a dataset and a pivot table or two.
Often when I’m away from the data for a couple of days, I return to a completely incomprehensible spreadsheet.
But it’s even worse with other people’s spreadsheets. Have you ever noticed that someone else’s spreadsheet rarely makes much sense to you?
The problem I think has to do with how open-ended spreadsheets can be. We love spreadsheets because they are so flexible for what we want to do. But because there aren’t many guardrails, it’s hard for anyone but ourselves really make sense of them.
It’s be like designing and building a home without and preconceived design standards or codes to follow. Sure you may end up with a home perfectly designed for yourself, but good luck selling it to anyone else. Or even enticing someone to come visit.
To be fair, I don’t think the solution is to put more guardrails up – spreadsheets are useful precisely because they are the digital equivalent of a piece of scratch paper. A yellow legal pad. Instead of handicapping them, we should instead know where they end, and where a more prepared, structured system is needed. A data warehouse, a BI system.
If you’re testing at theory or hashing out an idea, a spreadsheet is fine. But if it needs to be shared, it’s time to put thought into presentation and usability, and to do so, get out of the spreadsheet.