Ransom Note- Hey Give up those spreadsheets and no one gets hurt.
Nothing like an old fashioned gag to highlight a a truism and it's certainly true to say too many serious business decisions are made with the aid of spreadsheets. Leading British magazine The Economist implicates spreadsheets for the part they played in the international credit crisis.
In talking with prospective customers for our budgeting, modelling, forecasting and analytics products, people say well "We have been using spreadsheets for years, the work is done and the spreadsheets were free with the PC, it would be a waste of money to revisit this ." Or words to this effect.
Understandably they feel this way as there has been a lot of time invested in the spreadsheets.
Mistakes - There is lots of evidence that Spreadsheet are not fit for purpose. Errors in formula's, links to worksheets and too much cut and paste. Many financial market observers (Investors, commentators, Pension Funds) are very surprised to learn that the Markets were using spreadsheets to analyse, control and price risk.
Communication - Spreadsheets are essentially personal yet many organisations are sharing Spreadsheets. The possibility of error grows exponentially as the number of users climbs. Spreadsheets are not easily understood or well documented. It's well known that users force data, change formulas to get things done. And then forget (deliberately or otherwise) to advise these changes properly to others. Some organisations go through very expensive and time consuming spreadsheet re engineering when users leave organisations.
X & Y - Spreadsheets have 2 dimensions only. Above and Across that's it. One line of data down the side and across the top that's all. Most people want to see far more information than that. For example, sales by product, region, customer, year and month. That's very limiting and prevents productive number crunching.
Cost - It is very surprising but most companies have not costed the time spent generating, using, fixing, tracing errors in spreadsheets. In most cases it will far exceed the cost of an investment in a system. Why should using a spreadsheet be exempt from normal performance metrics. If there were used for manufacturing widgets they would have gone long ago!