Excelification meter

From a tool perspective it is hard to beat Microsoft Excel. Love or hate the Microsoft toolset or Microsoft in general I think you have to acknowledge Excel is a something that simply works and works for and at a variety of levels and ends. To maybe say it a different way, the developers have recognized the usefulness of the program ISN’T the program (on the surface). What makes Excel useful is that you can take data from a variety of sources and manipulate it to some end that provides value. I’ve heard it said Excel is the most widely known programming language and I agree. Good or bad, that is how I use it.

Contrast Excel’s ability to manipulate data with just about any IT related tool out there. To be fair Excel does have more than a slightly higher user base. And while I don’t expect a hammer and saw to be interchangeable I’m tired of using Enterprise scale tools whose vendors have created in such a way that they believe the tool itself is the end state. They don’t acknowledge – or worse don’t even comprehend – that their tools also need to be a means to an end. Generally speaking the tool might collect data and the vendors have tried to think about various use cases in order to support them with alerts, reports, etc. The problem is on a day to day basis this content isn’t sufficient to support deeper investigation or asks by management. What is turned to? Exporting the data to Excel.

We spend hundreds of thousands of dollar on all our various tools…and end up doing analysis and initial correlation in Excel. Crazy. Frustrating. I think we almost need some sort of Excel meter or term to gauge things when they come in the shop – “so what percent of the time are we going to have to use Excel to actually derive value from this $500k investment?”