Can you convince me that without Excel you won't have data?

Question

I led the no-Excel policy in one of the biggest retail companies in Europe and I think that since we moved into structured Dashboards and daily granular data we became even faster in making decisions, but we also simplified the complexity of a problem

I see more and more organization using EXcel to analyze and process data, I think it's wrong, I also think setting a reporting system such as Tableau or Power BI is wrong without having clear borders. We became super obsessed with data, and on every stupid thing we ask for a dashboard or we extract a lot of data into an Excel sheet and start working with it, just to find out we done nothing to actually grow our user's experience.

If you using Excel, I will love to be convinced I am wrong!

Katerina · Accepted Answer

Can't convince you. I had to teach an excel course to graduate students, because they'll most likely will use Excel in their job. It's a self-reinforcing loop (people use excel --> need to teach students excel --> after graduating students use excel -->....). I also think there is an overemphasis on having dashboards but forgetting that people need to understand the data behind it and how to us it.

Matthew Wildrick Thomas · Answer

I think there can be benefits to having to select the metrics that you need. If your pipeline is efficient, it means lots of eyes on whether what you are looking for is actually relevant. It also cuts down on the dashboard hell you mentioned.

Lior Barak · Answer

@katerinabohlec I actually think people should not have dashboards as all, but one fight at a time, first we need to get Excel killed in the organizations and later simlify as many dashboards as possible

LauraSmith · Answer

well nowadays I'm mainly using Airtable 2.0. Excel helped me a lot at start of my career.

Lior Barak · Answer

@laurasm00460050 where did you connect your Airtable to?

Can you convince me that without Excel you won't have data?

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