Why Should You Replace Excel Spreadsheets with Smart Online Spreadsheets?

Excel is a great tool to work on custom data sets and it saves tons of time when it comes to seeing and visualising data. But when you want to collaborate on an excel sheet and build quick applications on it, it may become cumbersome. Also, you must learn the shortcuts and watch tens of excel videos or read tutorials that you can easily forget after the first usage.  

As everything does, Excel spreadsheet requires consistency and maintenance after you create it. Also, if you are going to share your excel spreadsheets with your teammates, you can lose your data history, and the file you have shared may become something different with an updated version.

However, if you just want to hold and manage your data there are better, easier, and more secure solutions. These solutions give the power of a database on a spreadsheet with many collaborative features, cell history, comments, task assigns, file & image attachments, and even it has auto-generated forms like SurveyMonkey does.

Undoubtedly, spreadsheets are one of the most important inventions of the internet age. It saved tons of paper, didn't it? Excel saved the lives of many industries for a long time in the first transition to the digital era. Now, as we adapt to digital, our expectations from spreadsheets have started to increase. Who does not want things to get easier? Smart online spreadsheet tools that offer the efficiency of databases and the functionality and ease of use of spreadsheets are now replacing complex Excel spreadsheets.

Here are a few reasons that will increase your work efficiency by replacing your Excel spreadsheets with smart online spreadsheets and enable you to benefit from the new generation of internet technologies in the most effective way.

Excel Spreadsheets are Hard to Track

If you are using Excel spreadsheets offline, you have the risk of constantly updating multiple copies of an Excel spreadsheet by different users and never being able to collect the most up-to-date data in a single table.

Moreover, I am sure that we have often encountered problems such as not being able to use many features because we do not all have the same version of Excel. Say hi to the risk of data loss and format corruption when you try to view and edit an Excel spreadsheet prepared with a version of Excel that is not on your device, with the version on your computer.

In the scenario where you use Excel spreadsheets online, different risks arise. If you use Excel online, you have the risk of your collaborators exporting your tables without your authorization and sharing public links with unauthorized users. In addition, you may not notice that your data has changed, as it is difficult to follow the history logs on Excel.

Let's meet with the worst case. Think about your colleagues exporting the excel spreadsheet and sending them to you and other team members for every update. Imagine that each employee is constantly creating different versions by updating the Excel spreadsheet. It is almost impossible to keep track of which is the most up-to-date version of the table. Also, unfortunately, you will never be able to see who made the changes for each separately edited version.

You can prevent unauthorized data changes by moving your data from Excel to smart online spreadsheet tools. You can also see chronologically when and by whom all updates were made, which is even better. In fact, you can always protect your data by always protecting your main data and creating special views for your colleagues where they can collaborate. In addition, you do not need to worry about data loss thanks to version records.

Creating Links Between Data in Excel Is Difficult

Being able to create links between spreadsheets and create relational databases is an indispensable facility for effective data management. Instead of writing the same data to more than one spreadsheet and rearranging all spreadsheets for each change, being able to transfer data dynamically between spreadsheets via references makes work easier.  

But more importantly, it prevents incorrect data entry and complexity during data updates. When you update your data once from the main spreadsheet, it is dynamically updated instantly in all referenced spreadsheets, thanks to references.

Some functions in Excel spreadsheet are quite complex, require technical knowledge and require a long learning process. One of them is the function to create references between spreadsheets.

You have to write quite complex codes to dynamically reference related cells in other Excel spreadsheets and unfortunately, you risk breaking these codes with any column update. This takes you away from the dynamism and is often not preferred because of this complexity.

Smart online spreadsheet tools have the simplicity of creating relationships between spreadsheets with a few clicks. Here, you can find an example. Also, you will not lose your data relations in case of any column update.

Excel Spreadsheets are Hard to Adapt

Especially, if you are a beginner and have no experience with Excel spreadsheets, it can be challenging to learn Excel. Excel is more challenging to learn than smart online spreadsheets.

If you have set up an Excel system for some of your important and routine business operations, it can be an exceedingly difficult journey to learn Excel as well as adapt to this system, especially for your new team members. However, that is not your exact job, is it? Excel is just a tool, not your main job. It should be a facilitator for you, you should not spend all your time and effort learning it.

Instead of dealing with many features and complex interfaces that will not work for you and complicate your operations, online spreadsheets will be an excellent choice to adapt your team to your business faster. Thus, you can manage both your workload and your time in the most effective way. Especially if your new colleagues adapt to your processes as soon as possible, it also increases the efficiency you get from them. Instead of complex Excel spreadsheets, give more functional and user-friendly smart online spreadsheets a try.

Smart online spreadsheets do most of what Excel does and even have some features that Excel does not have at all. Thanks to the user-friendly interface, easy collaboration features, data visualization, smart charts, and exclusive functions, smart online spreadsheets have become the choice of many users.

Perhaps, it's time you left Excel spreadsheets and try smart online spreadsheets for a better data management process.

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