The Excel Mistake That KILLS Small Businesses

If you’re like me, you’ll love cool Excel formulae, VBA, Power Query and everything else Excel has to offer.  And, don’t get me wrong – the punch-the-air moments when these things work are epic.

But, the truth is, you might not need formulae, code or other features to fix your Excel problems.

A decade of consulting to organisations worldwide on data management issues has taught me one thing: the problems professionals experience are not created by a lack of knowledge of formulae, VBA or something else Excel-related.  In fact, I find most professionals are pretty good at Excel formulae, at least!  Some are better than me …

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It’s something more fundamental than that.

You see, most of the spreadsheets I’m asked to look at are a bit like a house.  But, not a normal house.  A house with the kitchen at the bottom of the garden.  A silly analogy perhaps, but I hope you get the point.  Having a kitchen at the bottom of your garden would be extremely inconvenient.  Imagine having to hook up electricity, plumbing, Wifi and other utilities – and that’s not to mention day-to-day usage!  You’re going to get cold …

The fact is Excel data management issues are created at the design level.  In practice, this means the number of worksheets (typically too many) in your file, and the layout of each sheet – which usually means how many columns are set up (typically too few).  And, there’s one more critical mistake – the management of large datasets.  You see, professionals often ‘split up’ or ‘fragment’ large datasets to make them easier manage.  Whilst I understand the motivation, this is a critical error, as we’ll see in today’s video …

A properly designed and structured Excel file can work like a dream, without complex Excel formulae, VBA code or anything else.  This, in my opinion, is what we should aim for.

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