How to turn an important spreadsheet into an app
And created something that people couldn’t wait to use.
If Microsoft Excel stopped working, it would take down the world economy.
That isn’t an exaggeration, crucial systems in governments, corporates and schools would break.
It’s crazy to think about, and for lots of these systems it does make sense to use excel. Excel (or Google Sheets) allows you to create complex logical steps, often sits within your tech ecosystem and is a powerful tool. But in lots of organisations, it’s used when it shouldn’t be. Someone had a clear vision for a tool that can hold lots of automations and they twist and bent excel to create their vision.
There have been lots of innovations that means that no longer needs to be the case. There are lots of occasions when a well thought out custom software would definitely be better.
For example, a financial excel sheet with client performance for the quarter (that you’re sharing with a client), a HR sheet with shift plans for the month, a task management sheet with list of snags reported by tenants in properties you manage, the list is long one.
We worked with a client recently, who heads up the sales department of an organisation that does $12 Billion+ in annual revenue. And he loves excel. One sheet he built was a mammoth, and behind it sat his vision for the future of his sales team.
For years, the sales staff were selling based on gut feel. They had a target number of units that they needed to hit each year and each year they would call people in their their jurisdiction to try and get as close to their target as possible.
The thing our client noticed is that it was actually more science than art — or at least more than most of the sales team realised. When you have a company of that size, you can read numbers and he realised that it was actually quite predicable how many sales an individual will make, based on historical metrics, the most important of which the sales person could actually control.
That was the general principle behind the excel. Educate the team on the relationship between their performance and those crucial metrics. Get them to work on the metrics (the inputs) and the outputs would take care of themselves, but this excel was huge and like so many mispurposed Excel sheets it suffered from a range of things:
- Unfriendly UI/UX: Excel isn’t the friendliest to look at, at the best of times. But lots of sheets with complex formulas makes it even harder
- No version control: As with any system, it was updated frequently. Our client would create a new one and send it out to all the sales team to use this new one.
- Lack of Security: The list of security flaws is extensive. But first and foremost, there was no authentication. Anyone could use the tool, view stats from someone else if the sheet was leaked etc.
- No analytics: There are a list of amazing stats that the tool could have captured that would have aided the entire organisation but weren’t captured through the process of duplicating this sheet.
- Slow: Once you get to a certain amount of calculations, excel starts to slow down and it isn’t friendly
This is the start of a long list. Fortunately, our client realised these limitations and approached us to build something great for them.
We built their new site in Flutter, a fully functioning app that revolutionised their sales process.
It looks beautiful, easy on the eye and to understand. It’s so much more intuitive than what we had before.
The tool is now used across the organisation and has led to a widespread increase in quotes and adoption of the sales teams vision.
Building something of this quality and scale was the right choice for them — and may be for you too, feel free to message me if you think this may be the case.
But there is also an in-between for a simpler use case or a smaller team, you may be able to explore other tools that maintain that logical power of excel/google sheets but also create a better user experience, and functionality and security.
Tools you can use to turn your Microsoft Excel into an App
- App Sheet: This platform excels in integrating complex data and simplifying app creation, making it a go-to for businesses looking to upgrade from traditional spreadsheets. This is a great place to start, your app will have some of the same limitations as excel or google sheets, authentication, scalability, security etc. but it is a great place to start to add that initial UI face to your complex sheet.
- Glide Apps: Perfect for those who seek a balance between simplicity and functionality. Glide turns spreadsheets into beautiful, easy-to-use apps in minutes. However, it is a little bit expensive once you get started and once you have more than 100 users. It’s great for fairly simple applications in a smallish organisation.
- Bubble.io: This tool is ideal for those who require a more customizable approach, offering the flexibility to build more intricate apps without needing extensive coding knowledge. However, if your sheet had moderately complex formulas, VLOOKUP or lots of nested IF statements, you may hit limitations using Bubble.io.
If you’re not sure if one of the below tools are right for you, or you want to explore with my team then shoot me an email at marcel@mokutan.io. We specialise in designing and creating custom software that is core to your business — software that is usable, friendly and able to scale with you.
