Monster of a spreadsheet? Is it time to leave it behind?

Have you got a monster of a spreadsheet? When is it time to leave your spreadsheet behind?

Many companies that we work with use spreadsheets as an integral part of their business, whether that be for tracking information related to their staff and customers, to managing projects and staying on budget.

However spreadsheets can quickly get out of hand, whether that be because of their size, functionality, or the technical ability of people that are required to use them as a team grows.

So at what point do you bite the bullet and look for a piece of dedicated software to handle this information and present it in a user friendly format?

Well this is the point where we come in.

Yes we can advise and implement ready-made software that can help you manage all areas of your operation but we can also customise and automate the project centres within your business that may not be quite ready or have budget for their own dedicated software, taking them from a spreadsheet to a user-friendly interface with easy reporting tools.

This is where we were able to find a cost-effective solution help Nicola.

Nicola came to us with a problem; she had been using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all of her project information, her business was growing and the more her business grew the more difficult it became to efficiently manage the large volume of information she needed for each upcoming project. She needed to record and track who the project is for, due dates, progress milestones and the key people involved in each area of the project.

Nicola could see that this process was becoming inefficient and asked us to find a simple way to capture the information relevant to her projects, view the stats on where they were at in terms of progress and to automate the process of creating reminders for upcoming key project milestones such as tender deadlines.

To give Nicola the functionality that she needed whilst keeping within budget it was clear that an off the shelf system was not going to work for her. 

So what did we do?

What our automation team was able to do for Nicola is create a hybrid solution using PowerApps to take all of the information from her spreadsheet and convert it to a user-friendly automated interface.

Rows of cells and spreadsheet pages became easy to use drop down menus and one page forms where Nicola and her team could input the information relevant to their projects and track their progress at a click of a button. 

It became a system that anyone could use and we were able to automate it so that when Nicola entered a project deadline it would automatically send an outlook calendar invite to the relevant members of her team so that they knew when their key deadlines were. This not only ensured that deadlines were always diarised, it streamlined Nicolas work process meaning that she had more resources to allocate to other areas of her projects. 

We were also able to create integrated reporting tools for Nicola that took her project information and represented it as Pie Charts and Bar Graphs for when she wanted an easy way to visualise and present her project data.

So if you, like Nicola are looking for a way to streamline your projects and spreadsheets please feel free to get in touch and a member of our specialist team will be more than happy to advise on how we can help you to become more efficient without breaking the bank.

Email us via our email or call us on 0330 1224 420

Questions: [email protected] 

Here's our live calendar!

Continue reading:

What Is App Fatigue & Why Is It a Security Issue? 

Workplace Productivity? Increase It With Streamlined Android Apps

Are your productivity tools actually slowing you down?