New Tools Enhance Excel

What's one way to destroy a finance department's productivity? Get rid of spreadsheets. How do you improve your finance department's productivity? Get rid of spreadsheets.

Of course, desktop spreadsheets are cheap and versatile, and millions of people work with them every day. In a corporate setting, however, the disadvantages and dangers of spreadsheets outweigh these conveniences. They are error-prone. They also are difficult to audit and clumsy to work with in collaborative, repetitive business processes such as budgeting. For years, businesses have endured a "can't live with them, can't live without them" relationship with desktop spreadsheets.

Alternatives have been too cumbersome, too expensive or both. Now, however, solutions are available that address the basic defects of spreadsheets. Spreadsheet management programs address error and control issues, while server-based spreadsheets improve performance in collaborative and repetitive business processes such as budgeting and the accounting close.

Spreadsheet Management

Spreadsheet management involves software for controlling stand-alone spreadsheets more effectively and completely. There are tools for auditing, tracking and control within Microsoft Excel, the dominant desktop spreadsheet application, but they are profoundly inadequate for all but the simplest requirements.

At the low end, simple Excel add-ons make it easier to track and spot changes so you can detect unauthorized or inaccurate modifications or determine which cells need checking. This software is easy to use and inexpensive, but its scope is limited. At the high end are more comprehensive (and more expensive) packages that discover and track spreadsheet files and manage access, accuracy and their audit.

While the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was the impetus for development of some packages (the software can function as a high-level control and cut audit costs), they also deliver value by helping to avoid expensive errors that occur when businesses rely on spreadsheets as input for business decisions (such as for pricing or on trading desks) or a situation such as an earnings restatement that poses a risk to a company's reputation. Time spent finding and fixing errors is a productivity issue that spreadsheet management tools can address as well.

Simple, relatively inexpensive add-ons include those from Lyquidity and Synkronizer. Lyquidity's product enables companies to identify and track all changes made to a spreadsheet. Users can filter the results to zero in on the changes relevant to their needs. Synkronizer is an Excel add-on that compares each cell entry in old and new versions of a spreadsheet and indicates data that was added, deleted or changed.

More comprehensive solutions from companies such as Cimcon Software Inc., ClusterSeven and Compassoft Corp. enable corporations to find and trace every spreadsheet on every desktop or laptop on the network. They provide a means of detecting errors (such as a value where a formula should be or a broken link) or control issues (for example, a reference to a hidden cell). They can centralize control of a spreadsheet, track changes in a way that is easy to trace and audit, and monitor all spreadsheets in use and the relationships between them.

Some products let users continue to keep their spreadsheets on their local hard drives, while others, such as those from Mobius, require controlled spreadsheets to be on separate servers. While the latter can be more secure, they sacrifice some flexibility.