by Nick
Monday, May 22, 2006 9:10 AM
People in insurance companies, financial institutions, and many other industries for that matter, absolutely love Excel. Love it! I think Excel is a great program, and you can do some absolutely incredible things with it. But too many people treat it like the only tool in their toolbox.
I don't know how many times I've received an Excel spreadsheet from someone with no numbers. None. Zero. Excel is built for doing number crunching, yet too many people use Excel to perform tabular layout of text. It's the wrong tool for the job! The first tendency of people when they type text into a cell in Excel is to shorten their sentences, use fragments, and provide incomplete information. The cell looks small, and almost encourages people to be incomplete. Not only that, but it takes forever to get it to print correctly because people have no concept of page size when it comes to a spreadsheet on screen, and Excel is not built for doing WYSIWYG formatting.
Did you know you can create tables and columnar pages in Word? It's pretty easy, yet people almost never do it. If there is one thing I'd love to see the Microsoft Office team do with the next version of Office, it's somehow either make that feature in Word easier to use so more people would use it, or create some Excel/Word hybrid for the purpose of doing tabular data presentation in a more complete and readable manner. The power of Word's text editing, with the easy layout of Excel. Sounds like a winner to me.