Paladone I Love Spreadsheets Mug

Product Information

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?!

Hear me out: Spreadsheets can do powerful calculations, they’re flexible, and they’re widely available! Sure, there are plenty of new platforms and apps around wanting to disrupt my spreadsheet habit (Hello, Airtable! I see you Coda 👋)— but I would need to start learning all over again. Spreadsheets are easy. They allow me to play around with numbers, presentation, formulae, graphs. They give me the freedom to prototype a solution without committing to the final output. There are few tools around in the world of finance that can grow with the business, enable finance to adapt to changing business requirements, and empower us to rapidly model business decisions into financial outcomes. 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 🥱 What is the business impact of managing a marketing function with the wrong toolset & what would the impact be if you changed things?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! Built-in workflow approvals that ensure a level of due diligence is followed in the preparation of financial information ⚠ RISK 4 — UNDETECTED ERRORS

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? I love a good spreadsheet and for calculating numbers and organizing information in columns and rows there’s nothing better. Surely your marketing department deserves a better toolset to deal with the challenges in today’s complex digital age? Andreas Jonsson, cofounder and chief executive of LinkedIn analytics app Shield, says spreadsheets can save you crucial time and money in the early days of a startup. Partly I think it’s symptomatic of a ‘we’ve always done it this way’ culture and partly because its more difficult to demonstrate return on investment - if a sales person doesn’t have a phone, they can’t make sales calls, simple as that. Does that make it right? Definitely not. If you run into problems, let me just say that you aren’t alone. Here are the ones that I ran into during my own merging experience:

I Love Spreadsheets Socks

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

Start by analyzing your processes and identify what your pain points are. Where do you regularly experience frustrations are there any easily identifiable challenges in your marketing process. 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. 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. Ability to limit access to data, or spreadsheets, within a workbook that contains sensitive information. I expect that, in many cases, the answer to that is they either don’t plan, or they spend ages writing stuff out on paper.Ultimately, in my mind, they’re used to organise chaos. A tornado of information is organised into rows, columns and sheets and suddenly, the world makes sense again. 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 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? I’m going to start with the easiest types of spreadsheet merging and then move onto the harder types of merging. After that, I’ll include some common problems I ran into and some other methods of merging spreadsheets that you could use! Enable role profile access to be provisioned per spreadsheet. Access could be edit or read-only. Copy/paste functionality could be a privilege rather than a default permission.