Conversations from the Mirror42 Team

So what is really going on in the Eurozone? KPI Library consolidated all the data from Eurostat, OECD, IMF, Worldbank and some other data resources and visualized all the key data.

See for yourself: Visit the KPI Library Eurozone Dashboard.

No. Not a typo. Spreadshit. And let me repeat it. Spreadshit. So, that is out of the way.

We were brainstorming tag lines the other day for KPI Dashboard. We came up with “No more spreadsheets”. And soon it became, “No more spreadshit”. Most people try to manage business performance in spreadsheets. That’s understandable. It seems cheap, and most business people are familiar with spreadsheets. Heck, some people can create some really nice stuff with some help from our friends in Redmond.

It has, though, some serious shortcomings. Let us illustrate with three simple examples.

Research shows that a big percentage of spreadsheets contain errors. The more tabs, fields and formulas, the higher the chance that your spreadsheet contains bugs. You program it, and you make mistakes. And maybe with some serious consequences. If you assume, that based on your calculations in your spreadsheet, you have a positive cashflow, but in real life you don’t, it might get you in big big trouble.

Spreadsheets are not meant for sharing. They may become to big to sent easily by email, or even opened for that matter. At some point recipients do not even try to take a peek; they just wait for the next update, or the Powerpoint presentation with some copy-paste images of graphs in the spreadsheet. So you spent all this time (and money) in performance reporting but no-one reads the outcome. And some day, fatally, your spreadsheet crashes, and the last back-up is 4 months old.

And to top things off, just visualize that your spreadsheet wizard / master leaves the company.

Yes. You can build anything with spreadsheets. And it seems cheap. But we, management, staff and shareholders at Mirror42, wouldn’t trust our company performance reports to our resident spreadsheet master — and that is our CEO by the way (he is a gifted Powerpoint wizard too, incidentally).

Mirror42 wishes you all the best for 2010.