The Right Order to Move Off Excel

Excel isn't a spreadsheet program — in most companies, it's the system of record. Orders live there, inventory lives there, the customer list lives there. That's not a failure: Excel got the job done, it's cheap, and everyone knows how to use it. But past a certain point, its cost starts climbing invisibly.

You'll know when you've hit the limit

If you've heard any of these sentences, you're there:

• "Which one is current — Sarah's copy or mine?"
• "Can you close that file? I can't save."
• "Where do I find last month's version?"
• "Someone broke the formula, and we don't know when."

They're all symptoms of the same thing: multiple copies of the same truth.

The right order to migrate in

The most common mistake is starting with the biggest spreadsheet. The right approach is the opposite.

1. Move where data is written first, not where it's read. Wherever data gets entered should be the single place it gets entered. Reports can keep coming out of Excel for a while longer; nobody will die.

2. Bring the old data over as-is. Try to clean it while migrating, and the project turns into a data-cleanup project and dies there. Migrate first, clean later.

3. Keep Excel open for a while. Running both in parallel for two weeks is the cheapest way to answer "did we actually transfer this correctly?" by testing it instead of guessing.

4. Ship the export button on day one. People love Excel because they can slice and dice data however they want. Don't take that away: an "Export to Excel" button is the single most effective feature for getting people to adopt the new system.

Know what you're giving up

Excel's real power is flexibility. You don't ask anyone's permission to add a column. If the new system makes that hard, people will open a fresh spreadsheet next to it — and you're back to the problem you started with.

That's why the system you migrate to has to be one you can change. Moving into something you can't change is worse than staying in Excel.