With a new tool, spreadsheet users can construct custom database interfaces
OK... but where are decent user-friendly tools to manipulate, manage and share data and insights? Really, the problem is that to this day data in Corporations is a mess. The moment you step out of the standard warehouse systems you find yourself navigating a mess of spreadsheets, word docs, power points, all showing sometimes the same data in different formats. You duplicate data every time you send an Excel file by email... this data needs to be in sync and when not people get screamed at or fired. That means a lot of work goes into manually maintaining thousands of different files to make sure they tie to the overall picture. It&#x27;s a mess. The bad part is that nobody is looking into this, everybody is focusing on analytics or reporting, which by now are the easy part.<p>Then you have ancient tools like HFM or BPC that try to &quot;enhance&quot; spreadsheets and spreadsheets consolidations. They don&#x27;t work. They are barely reliable and they cost a lot of money for no reason (they are simple SQL databases, they can&#x27;t even be compared to much more complex software like salesforce or similar).<p>Then Corporations are now being sold this all &quot;big data&quot; thing, which is old by now for tech audiences, but it&#x27;s just new for most of the big companies nowadays. Unfortunately, while big data has a lot of potential, it further moves away investments on good old small data where probably there is much more ROI to grab simply because solving this problem is not that difficult and not that expensive if you want to actually fix it.<p>Then now everybody wants to do Predictive, but Predictive won&#x27;t beat saving hundreds of employees thousands of working hours by improving the efficiency of how we handle data and data insights. You can literally create a new workforce out of the many hours you would save with better efficiency in this area. Without even considering that on top of efficiency, you get much better, more fact based, decisions driven by the overall increase in transparency which you lose when insights are spread around thousands and thousands of files.<p>There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Software solutions like Tableau go in the right direction, but they do not provide the much (more) needed tools to properly manipulate and manage data and, especially, consolidations and integration. The only way to get out of this mess is to control the data flow but especially to have 1 and only 1 data flow. That means once your insights are approved and locked, every other view should read this data, there should be no manual intervention any more. If the locked data is wrong, it will be wrong for everybody, which is a good thing compared to having multiple copies of the same and then people fighting on which one is the right one.