Excel is an indispensable tool in modern business. We use it every day. We use it in varying degrees of deftness and aptitude. Some of us use it as a giant calculator while others take advantage of functions, pivot tables, macros, and visual basic. We use it to handle small amounts of data to creat files so large they exceed the limits of some email services (thankfully there is dropbox and other file sharing applications). We use it to draw all kinds of graphs. We cut and paste part of spreadsheets and graphs from Excel to Word and PowerPoint.
As helpful and indispensable a tool as Excel is, there are good uses and there are certainly abuses. For purposes of this posting, we will consider the use of Excel in conjunction with ERPs. ERPs such as SAP and Oracle are designed to manage, in a connected way, the transactions of a business. They provide an integrated data structure from transactions to the general ledger to financial reporting. The main benefit from our perspective is data integration and allowing the system to handle the bulk of the transactions and people to manage exceptions. The people then work to minimize the exceptions over time through process improvements and sound data management.
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