The ultimate spreadsheet, MS Excel, is one of the pillars of modern society. Half world’s financial models are made based on it, and the same goes for the construction industry.
We do everything with excel; we love it: budgets, structural calculations, project supervision, even invoice or report templates.
But… what are the limitations?
- Collaboration is completely restricted, the only option is to work with a file on a shared server. But this clearly has its limitations and risks.
- Too flexible. Excel’s biggest advantage is that everything can be edited. However, this very strength is a weakness when working with more people in the same file. It is very difficult to keep order.
- Traceability. In an Excel is a file, there is no way to keep the traceability of the changes that are being made. Important limitation for projects that extend in time.
- Data structure. The most significant limitation, Excels’ capacity is very limited when it comes to complex relationships between entities and/or variables.
We love Excel, but one must be able to differentiate between the cases in which it adds value and those in which it presents a weakness – it will slow us down.
An alternative to Excel could be to develop custom digital tools tailored to the specific needs. Another cheaper and easier to implement alternative is the use of specific commercial software for the tasks to be performed.
It will save us hours of work and money, and above all, we will avoid troubles.
To learn how to replace Excel in the site planning and supervision context, we invite you to discover odei.io.
