A very common way for businesses to store data is within Excel. People are convinced of Excel’s superiority as a database. I mean, after all, Excel is familiar right? It’s easy and it’s user-friendly and you’ve been using it for years. There is just one problem with this – Excel is not a database.
Excel was made as a spreadsheet application. Sure, it is a great complement to any database due to its ability to turn your rows of data into nice looking charts and reports. But when it comes down to it, storing your data is not a job Excel was made to do.
On a recent project, a client delivered their thousands of lines of customer data to us across multiple Excel files. If we were to combine all of this data into one workbook, Excel’s performance would dramatically drop. Similarly, by keeping all the data sets separate, the files would be much smaller and easier to work with performance wise - though analysing the data across multiple Excel files would prove far too difficult.
By merging all the datasets together into SQL Server and through robust analysis methods and our Data Profiling and Deduplication tools we were able to eliminate thousands of lines of bad data and duplicates that would be near enough impossible to pick up using Excel analysis tools. We shrunk our client’s database to less than half of its original size by removing records that were not fit for purpose and fixing those that remained, thereby leaving our client with good data that they could actually use.
A big incentive to not use Excel for storing your data is if you think about how easily you could corrupt or even lose that data. There will probably be several copies of one database sitting with various different people across your organisation, thus making version control difficult. Even storing the file on a shared server will not eliminate the chances of people overwriting each other’s work. If multiple users will need read and write access to your data then it’s time to look for other, more viable options than Excel.
Of course you can use Excel as a simple, flat database. But in our experience most businesses require a far more complex solution to store their data, as datasets get larger and larger, require better collaboration and security methods and need to be protected from bad data entry. All this is just not supported by Excel’s core functionality.
If you are still storing your data within Excel and would like to talk about finding a better fit for your needs, contact Acuate and we will find you your ideal solution.
