The word data is cohesive with Microsoft Excel for almost every small or medium business in India and around the world. It is a three-decade-old tool that is easy to learn and adapt to the general requirements of an organisation.

MS Excel had successfully replaced IBM's Lotus 1 - 2 - 3 in the mid-'90s, and since then, they are the market leaders. According to softpedia.com 2012 report, Microsoft's Office platform has been by over 1 billion people worldwide.

Excel gained popularity for many reasons, with the flexibility of application being the primary one. Any business could immediately get on to the platform and start using it without much training. Here are a few important ones.

Diverse Business Application of Spreadsheets

Different departments of micro, small and mid-sized business have been using Excels & other cloud spreadsheets like Google & Zoho for varied necessities, and to build reports for business heads. Listed below are some everyday applications of spreadsheets across different organisational teams.

Admin & HR team

• Centralised Employee Data Sheets
• Attendance | Leave Management | Timesheets
• Forms | Performance reviews
• Pre-defined templates for payroll
• Login credentials and more.

Sales & Marketing team

• Deals| Leads | Contacts,
• Weekly | Monthly Targets | Quotes,
• Meetings | Events | Roadshow Data |Field Visit Data,
• Website Information | Product | Service Specifications,
• Price List | Vendor Product Information,
• Campaign Data | Others.

Production & Finance team

• Tax filings | Client | Vendor Bills
• Sales Orders | Purchase orders | Estimates | Expenses,
• Banking Transactions | Inventory Management | Project details,
• Pending Payments | More.

Why Migrate away from excel?

Most companies, after years of usage of excel, reach a stage where they will have static bits of information on multiple excel and no real, meaningful insight.

To ease work, read trends, patterns, reduce errors, and repeated routines of data entry, a business needs to adapt to cloud applications.

Listed here are a few reasons every business must move away from excel.

Hidden Essential Data

Raw data that is usually present among a cluster of data could hide essential data. Only employees who are familiar with visual elements of excel tend to use 3d charts & graphs to display complex information at hand.

Loss of Data

To store and restore historical data often needs a robust design and adoption to keep it regularly updated. Comparing a more extended period of microdata could become an issue, along with spotting trends and detecting anomalies.

Sharing capabilities

With even the latest of spreadsheets, it is laborious to share among multiple team members and ensure that there are less human errors like data loss or manipulation.

Familiarity

Excel could be intimidating and confusing to adopt for employees who are not familiar with or aware of the available features. A large part of the employee force is alienated and let alone get excited about using and analysing using excel.

A progressive business requires dynamic software that is designed to adapt technology along with being user-friendly and affordable.

Try and build a simple drag and drop interface database via Zoho Creator that allows building forms, databases, workflows, mobile apps with customisations along with extensive automation capabilities.

Read more about Zoho Creator and its Features.