Danger: Excel at work

The FT’s Lisa Pollack on the power – and danger – of Excel:

While Excel remains the utensil of choice, it comes with risks. Recent history has shown that poorly monitored spreadsheets can be costly for organisations. Yet slightly more than half the senior managers responding to a survey earlier this year said there were either “no usage controls at all” or “poorly applied manual processes” in spreadsheets used by their companies.

I’d not really thought of things this way before. Companies’ instinctive reliance on Microsoft Office, and employees’ familiarity with it, might be creating a rather dangerous situation where they’re pushing into areas where good governance would suggest using a specialist tool instead.

Another symptom of the often too cosy relationship between Microsoft and Enterprise IT professionals, perhaps? Maybe Word does need to die…