Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and my life would be poorer without them. When used for the right applications, they are powerful, versatile, and dependable tools.
Managing people and tasks is not one of those applications.
Do any of these sound familiar to you?
- Constantly having to use VLOOKUP or INDEX functions to find the information you’re looking for in another sheet.
- Date fields and cell formatting are not behaving like you expect them to.
- Changing the colour of cells to create Gantt charts.
- Creating (and updating) data validation lists to allow for selection from a drop-down menu.
- Accidentally updating an older version of the spreadsheet because Bob from marketing didn’t correctly increment the latest iteration and share it with the team. Damnit, Bob.
It’s time to ditch the spreadsheets.
Yes, there are workarounds, but why bother when there are tools available that are better suited for the job and can often solve your problems on the free pricing tiers?
Find a solution that will provide a “single source of truth” for your team and serve as the hub of your management workflows. A few standouts come to mind: Notion, Clickup and even Airtable.
They are all cloud-hosted database solutions, allowing for synchronous collaboration and even document storage. Depending on your pricing tier, you can even access automatic version control and comprehensive data rollbacks.
Bring some order to your spreadsheeting chaos. Your team (and sanity) will thank you.