If you’re into coding, working with Excel in your programs can be really fun! The most common way to connect with Excel is using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is what most Microsoft Office programs are programmed with. There are many resources available online but here’s a great starter. Just mentioning Excel, spreadsheets or workbooks is often enough to send most people to sleep. If they do manage to stay awake, they’ll want to change the topic of conversation. Although, if their only experience with spreadsheets is what we were taught at school, I’d be the same so I totally get it. It’d be great to see some comments around what you use spreadsheets for, what application you use to create / edit them and what related projects you might like to see. An approval process that releases a financial model, or a spreadsheet of any kind, into ‘production’. This approval process should certify that the workbook has passed an audit and is available for general use. ⚠ RISK 5 — SPAGHETTI JUNCTION

CFOs must have confidence in their data. They must know the exact data sources that feed into their financial reports — and their providence. The reality is that many finance departments don’t have visibility into data flows across their spreadsheet landscape. The data links between the different spreadsheets across departments, regions, and models are routinely undocumented and so impossible to view and accurately decipher. Dear spreadsheet — if it’s not too much to ask, can you make it easy for me to see where the data is coming from? The Reinhart-Rogoff Facepalm Moment — Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two of the most respected and influential academic economists active today. Or at least, they were. Ability to have real-time dialogue between team members within a workbook with mention functionality. I want to stay in flow when I’m in the spreadsheet zone 🙏 So, spreadsheets — while I 💓 you, there are some areas we need to work on. I went ahead and made a list (I hope you’ll forgive me 🤨!)

Overview

However, when they obtained the actual spreadsheet used for the original calculations, they identified three errors. Built-in workflow approvals that ensure a level of due diligence is followed in the preparation of financial information ⚠ RISK 4 — UNDETECTED ERRORS The definition of merging spreadsheets is right in its name — we want to combine two or more spreadsheets into a single spreadsheet. This is a really essential skill to learn for any novice Excel users out there. Interesting… what should I already know? I love a good spreadsheet, I genuinely do, I’ve recently gone through a massive house renovation project and this was essential for managing the budget – there was also the huge satisfaction of when things came in under budget, my formula would automatically calculate a positive! (unfortunately this didn’t happen very often) It’s not uncommon for spreadsheets to proliferate across an organisation. with work becoming more decentralized and teams working remotely, I’m willing to bet there are multiple copies of every spreadsheet hanging over the metaverse. And yet, there is no inventory or repository kept of all spreadsheets in use.

On April 16, doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released the results of their analysis of two 2010 papers by Reinhard and Rogoff. Reinhart and Rogoff’s work showed average real economic growth slows (a 0.1% decline) when a country’s debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP) — and this 90% figure was employed repeatedly in political arguments over high-profile austerity measures. I’ve dealt with marketing managers who run their entire marketing plan from one spreadsheet. This hallowed document takes months to prepare and is access protected to try and manage version control & file corruption; it goes through hundreds of iterations before the marketing director can approve it. The issue with this is not around planning – that’s a perfectly sensible thing to do, the problem is what happens next. A plan is only as good as its execution and using a spreadsheet is not fit for purpose. At this stage what marketers need is marketing resource management (MRM) solution, something that is agile and will allow them to link their plan to actual campaigns and adjust it accordingly when required. What is the business impact of managing a marketing function with the wrong toolset & what would the impact be if you changed things?A graphical representation of the interrelationships within a workbook would be really useful. I know I can trace precedents — but it’s a horrible process 🥱 I know how wierd it sounds to say “I love spreadsheets!”. I mean, you don’t hear people saying things like “I love Word documents!”, or, “I love JPEGS!” do you?! The proliferation of spreadsheets across the world of finance is largely due to its flexibility and ease of use. For exactly those reasons, anyone can create a poorly executed, undocumented and visually impressive spreadsheet. Whenever finance think ‘how can I do this without IT or data engineering’, spreadsheets are the go-to tool of choice. I love spreadsheets! I genuinely do. It may possibly be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever admitted to. Maybe it’s the IKEA effect, having invested 20 years honing vlookup skills, formatting pivot tables, and choosing just the right graph to make my financial data mean something to someone, or maybe I just like the feeling of sinking into that comfortable spreadsheet memory foam. Don’t get me wrong, my spreadsheets are far from perfect, but I just can’t walk away. Imagine a world without spreadsheets; hard as this may be, they are not fit for the purpose you might be using them for. What in an ideal world would make your life easier? A web based tool, a built in communications platform, a central point for everyone to work in, from designers through to marketers, the ability to manage multiple output channels from one point?

Another option is using an API. As a starting place, here’s an article about how to read spreadsheets using an API in Python. With an API, we’re able to use other languages like Java or R as well!An inventory of pre-approved templates with documented approval and owners, categorized into levels of risk Now they pretty much do anything,” he says. “The flexibility has been growing a lot and doesn’t show signs of stopping. That’s why at Rows we built the spreadsheet that works as modern teams do — it’s data-rich, collaborative and crazy fast. You can build anything from everyday tasks and lead lists, to automated reports and internal tools” I’m not alone either! In 2017, research showed that 71% of organizations are using excel to collect data across business units. The demand for end user computing (EUC) applications has never been higher. Even with the proliferation of platforms across finance, many teams are still reconciling and aggregating data in spreadsheets despite unprecedented investment in IT solutions. The ex-auditor in me shudders when I think of the risks inherent in spreadsheet use across finance. Can you think of another system in finance that doesn’t have access controls built in? For good reason, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) requires that all organisations should behave ethically and limit access to financial data. Data breaches and leaks are not uncommon, and can lead to significant financial loss for a company — recently evidenced by the FinCEN leaks in the US. The ability to simply, and securely, link workbooks directly to a data source — eliminating the need to replicate data by copy/paste ⚠ RISK 2 — TOO MANY COOKS