Excel Isn't the Problem. The Process Around It Is.

Emily Goh · 2026-03-28

Stop blaming Excel.

Every ops team I talk to has a moment where someone says "We need to get off Excel."

Usually someone important says it. Often a new hire from a bigger company. "We shouldn't be managing [critical business thing] in a spreadsheet."

And they're not wrong. You probably shouldn't be managing critical things in a spreadsheet.

But the problem isn't Excel. It's what you're using Excel for.

What's actually happening.

Let me describe what I see at most mid-market companies.

There's a spreadsheet. Let's call it the "Customer Health" spreadsheet.

It started as a simple thing. One person created it to track which customers were at risk of churning. It had columns for Company Name, MRR, NPS Score, Last Engagement Date, Health Status, Notes.

It was useful. So other people started using it.

The VP of Customer Success wanted to add a column for "Contract Renewal Date." Sales wanted to add "ARR" and "Growth Opportunity." Finance wanted to add "Payment History." Marketing wanted to add "Product Usage."

Now the spreadsheet has 30 columns. It's being updated by five different people. There's no version control. When someone updates a customer's health status, the other people don't know.

The spreadsheet is now being used as:

• A database (source of truth for customer data)
• A collaboration tool (five people are editing it)
• A reporting layer (you pull reports from it for board meetings)
• A business logic engine (formulas that calculate health status, renewal risk, etc.)
• An audit trail (sort of -- you have comments but no real version history)

And it has zero validation. When someone types a customer name, there's nothing that checks if it's a valid customer. When someone enters an MRR, there's nothing that checks if it matches the billing system.

So what you actually have is a house of cards. It looks organized. But it's held together by hope and the fact that nobody's asked a hard question about the data yet.

The moment it breaks.

Then one day, someone pulls a report for the CEO. "Here's our at-risk customers." The CEO looks at the list and says "Wait, I thought we fired Company X? Why are they still on here?"

Someone has to go investigate. Turns out Company X is in the spreadsheet under three different names: "Company X," "Company X Inc," and "CompanyX" (no space). All three are marked as at-risk. So the health status was never consolidated.

Now someone has to manually find and consolidate all the duplicate customer records.

But there's a formula in the "Churn Risk" column that's based on "Health Status." So when you change it, the formula breaks.

The whole spreadsheet is now a mess.

Why this isn't Excel's fault.

Excel is doing exactly what you told it to do. It's storing data. It's letting you edit it. It's calculating formulas.

The problem isn't Excel. The problem is that you're using one spreadsheet to do five jobs:

• Store data (that's a database job)
• Collaborate (that's a collaboration tool job)
• Calculate metrics (that's a business logic job)
• Report (that's a reporting job)
• Track changes (that's an audit trail job)

Excel can do all five of those things. But it can't do them well at the same time. No validation. No version control. No separation of concerns. No permission system.

You could switch to Airtable. You could switch to Notion. You could build a custom app. But if you use it the same way -- as a database, collaboration tool, reporting layer, and business logic engine all at once -- you'll hit the same problems.

The tool isn't the problem. The process is.

What actually needs to happen.

You need to separate those five jobs.

The data storage piece. That should live in one place. One table. Clear definitions. Required fields. Data type validation. No duplicates.

The collaboration piece. People need to be able to input data. But there should be a form. The form should validate the input before it gets stored. If the data fails validation, it doesn't go in.

The reporting piece. You pull data from the source of truth and display it in reports. But the reports are read-only. You edit the source data, and the reports update automatically.

The metric calculation piece. Your rules about how to calculate "Health Status" or "Churn Risk" live in one place. When the rule changes, you update it once and all the reports update.

The audit trail piece. When someone changes data, you know who changed it, when they changed it, and what it used to be.

You can do all of this in Excel. You just have to set it up correctly.

Or you can do it in a better tool. But the tool doesn't matter if the process is still broken.

The actual fix.

Stop treating Excel like a database.

Use it for what it's actually good at: working with structured data, doing calculations, and creating reports.

But set up a real database underneath it. A source of truth. Could be a simple Google Sheet with data validation. Could be Airtable. Could be a proper database. Doesn't matter. But it needs to be where your data lives.

Use a form to input data. Not direct editing of the spreadsheet. The form validates before it stores.

Use Excel to report on the data. Pull it from the source of truth, create reports, share those.

Don't have people editing the reports directly.

That's it.

The thing nobody says.

Here's what I think is actually true: teams don't want to "get off Excel." They want to get off the pain of managing data in Excel.

If you could manage data in Excel without all the headaches -- the duplicates, the validation issues, the version control problems -- you'd do it. Excel is familiar. It's cheap. It's powerful.

The problem isn't the tool. The problem is that the tool is being misused.

So instead of blaming Excel, ask yourself: "What jobs are we asking Excel to do? Can we separate those jobs so each tool is doing one job well?"

The answer isn't always "Use a different tool."

Sometimes the answer is "Use Excel better."

But usually, it's "We need a process that validates data before it goes in, stores it in one place, and doesn't let people edit the source of truth directly."

You can do that with Excel. You just have to be intentional about it.

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