When all you have is a spreadsheet…
Here's an interesting post on how a Formula 1 team used Excel to manage their car parts. An excerpt:
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
This is so common I would be shocked to not find a mission critical process powered by Excel in any business that isn't being run by die hard techies. The comments section is full of wisdom, like this:
Excel gets a bad rap, the reality is that it’s often the only resource available to an isolated individual who is trying to solve a problem that’s not on everyone’s radar. But because they only have an idea they don’t have the resources to motivate for a massive budget or have the time for a software search/build. Excel to the rescue, AND it’s been amazingly effective.
The reason I've built an entire system for requesting and submitting product data and texts around Excel (driven by Power Automate flows and API connections to trigger actions and move data around) at my current workplace isn't because there aren't better suited tools for the task. It's because Excel is what's available for me to work with.
And then there's this comment:
In the same interview, Vowels says he changed the way the team classified their parts in a way that increased the quantity tenfold:
“Our chassis went from a few hundred bits to a few thousand bits. That's just one part of the car.”
Before that, the team were using Excel to track a sheet with 2,000 lines; which it's perfectly capable of doing.
To me, this is a story about someone coming from a big company with big data systems and asking the small company to put a similar quantity of data through its simpler and different setup…
… then having to scramble because it turns out, your new employer's systems weren't built for your old employer's working practices.
Which is probably spot on. Most tools tuned to working with circa 2,000 lines of data are probably going to need some restructuring if you 10x the number of parameters you're tracking.
All that aside, there's probably not a single task you'd consider solving with a spreadsheet that can't be solved more conveniently with a dedicated system. Kinda like how there's really no reason to use for an actual hammer if you're building something these days.