7 Reasons to stop using Excel for your FF&E Specs

Cons:

• Error-Prone: While spreadsheets are powerful and easy to use, they also lends itself to easily making errors – expensive errors. Imagine you have hundreds of items in a sheet, with quantities and multiple currencies for each. As you work through checking each item, you get through a third of the list and you’re probably already drained with looking at all that data in a small font. Suffice to say, it’s is really easy to add a zero or two where there shouldn’t be any. The lack of any in-built checks and balances is like walking through a minefield blindfolded.
• Collaboration – Yes, Cooperation – No: While you can collaborate on most cloud based spreadsheets, with no in-built checks and balances the quality of the collaboration become questionable. It’s not easy to incorporate a workflow such as internal approvals before something gets sent out to a client. Even if you manage, how do you hide the internal workings of your organization from the final output that is shared? It’s even more complex when everyone has their own “Final Final” update of a sheet! Come time to review you need to first figure out which is the most current and accurate version.
• Image Manipulation is a nightmare: Working with images in a tool meant to crunch numbers is as frustrating as trying to herd cats. Best of luck to you if you want to position a photo of that bedside table alongside the cell with its description and quantity. And when you finally have it in place, your client comes back with a preference of having it in the walnut finish instead – swapping images out is no easy feat.
• Changes: While we are on the topic of changes, revising anything in a spreadsheet is laborious. Having to specify a new fabric for a set of items, means each item will need to be updated separately. Although ‘Find & Replace’ exists, it’s speed gives you a false sense of accomplishment that everything is done right. You will need to recheck every instance to ensure that you have not made a mistake.
• Data Accuracy and Conformity: Inches, feet, centimeters, millimeters – all of these exist in bliss in spreadsheets and when time comes to use them in a calculation, its easy to create a mess. Designers have to be especially wary when plugging in dimensions and account for unit conversions in their calculations.
• Lost product intelligence: If you want to look up a chair in that hotel you completed last year prepare yourself to search through a crazy folder structure (that made sense at the time). Every new product you create in a spreadsheet exists independently and even though designers specify tried and tested products over 50% of the time, you will need to enter everything from scratch for each instance.
• Security: While excel has some security features (password protection and read only permissions), you can’t really effectively shave down access rights to specific bits of information (e.g. pricing). To do it effectively you will need to maintain different versions of a single sheet which is time consuming and laborious to manage. If you need someone to make changes on your spreadsheet you will need to email it across. Once it has left your computer you have relinquished control of who has access to it. With the increasing occurrence of data leaks these shares have the potential to be dangerous for your company.