Spreadsheets vs. Web Apps

A very good friend of mine, who just happens to own a small winery here in New Hampshire, stopped in to see me this week.  It was a friendly visit, but as usual we got talking about all things technology and of course, wine.  Knowing that Keene Systems develops custom solutions for common business…

In a business environment, data takes many forms. Before the advent of computers, data was all captured in a world of paper. But in 1979, the world’s first spreadsheet, VisiCalc was introduced. Since there were very few computer programs at the time, people used VisiCalc not just for doing calculations…

According to one recent study, the amount of data in the world was estimated to have hit about 44 zettabytes by the beginning of 2020. By as soon as 2025, the volume of data generated each day is expected to hit 463 exabytes across the globe – something that brings with…

One of the major issues that most organizations run into when they still rely on old database systems is that by and large you’re talking about single user systems that were only ever designed to run on one computer. This may have “gotten the job done” in a previous era,…

There was a time during the 1990s when most businesses still handled their important processes the exact same way: through a single threaded spreadsheet that could essentially only be used by a single person at one time. Keep in mind that this was also during a period when 56k Internet…

In a lot of situations, businesses are still using spreadsheets as a database to capture key intelligence and other information – which is a decision that certainly brings with it its fair share of challenges. More often than not, once the data is entered into a spreadsheet it tends to stay there,…

  Why Are You Still Running the Company on Spreadsheets? You already know something is broken. The spreadsheet your ops manager built three years ago has 47 tabs, nobody fully understands it anymore, and last quarter someone accidentally overwrote a formula that cost you two days of reconciliation work. Sound…

If you examine the day-to-day processes of many early-stage companies, you’ll often find that they have one thing in common: a lot of them use spreadsheets to manage a wide range of different aspects of their business. Whether you’re talking about Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets doesn’t matter – they…

Most people think that the IT issue that is preventing them from working is the result of failed technology. They jump to all kinds of conclusions: “It must be a bug in the software!” “It’s a systems failure!” “I wonder if someone hacked into the network?” Any one of these…

Businesses still use standard spreadsheet applications for a wide range of different reasons. Sometimes they’re used for menial and administrative tasks like data entry, other times they’re used to keep track of larger issues like project progress, client relationships and more. Many organizations choose to rely on these solutions that…