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Here are some of the reasons why you should turn your Excel spreadsheet into an app, and how to go about that. Why should you turn your Excel spreadsheet into an app?įor all their usefulness, spreadsheets can quickly turn into what’s known as “Excel Hell” due to one or two simple mistakes. So, when do spreadsheets fail and how can turning them into an app help you avoid their pitfalls? Such as when JP Morgan lost about $6.5 billion during the so-called “London Whale” incident because of several faulty equations and copy-pasted cells. With spreadsheets constantly circulating around, chances are the latest version will get lost sooner or later. Moreover, updates by different people can end up damaging the core data and make the file unusable. When you move your data to an app, you can limit users’ access to the “master version” of your spreadsheet, and only allow admins to access it. Under this setup, users are only given access to specific data and fields, with everything else remaining hidden. Excel does not work like a database and is difficult to scale This allows them to conduct the operations they need, without inadvertently corrupting the native spreadsheet. While Excel is a good place to store and manipulate data, it does not offer the functionalities of a database or, rather, of a data management system. Excel does not support complex data types, nor relations between files and records or different sets of data.
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This limits the types of operations you can perform. Moreover, when used on a desktop and not online, spreadsheets don’t allow for real-time multi-user input. Your spreadsheet then soon becomes a hindrance to scaling operations and improving efficiency.
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This is further compounded by the fact that as files grow in size, operations become slower and more cumbersome.
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