For those of you who have been audience to one of my seminars or live presentations, you know that the one thing I absolutely despise in the reporting and BI space is massive, over-sized, multi-tabbed excel spreadsheets. Yep, I hate Excel. Well, I don’t really HATE Excel per say, I just consider cumbersome spreadsheets the “Used Car Salesmen” of information distribution. They both just push a lot of data at you without taking into account what you really want to see.

What started out as a novel and flexible way to consolidate statistics and distribute it in an easy to manuever format has turned into a resource hemorrhage and data-lockup of near catastrophic proportions. Now this may seem a bit brash to some of you; especially those of you who knew me 5 or 6 years ago when I had entire departments centered around generating consolidated spreadsheets for multiple call centers. But let me also remind you how the concept for BlueVue originally came about.

Not only is manually inputing numbers into a spreadsheet an incredible waste of human capital, it’s also an incredibly inefficient way to absorb information. Outside of conditional formatting and static charts there is no way to quickly and effectively illustrate to an information consumer what elements they need to pull out and act on; more often than not mission critical data is lost in a sea of useless statistics.

So why then has Excel, and other spreadsheet applications, become the de facto standard for data delivery in almost every company in every corner of the planet? I suppose for starters, it is somewhat easy to use, has an all too familiar interface, and can be used to distribute a large amount of data to a mass of people. Let’s face it, its easy to attach a file to an email and hit send.

I actually conducted a poll a few months ago and roughly 75% of people that recieve a report via email as part of a daily distribution list knew less than 45% of the other people on the distribution list. My point? Not only is 55% of that report data getting in the way of you finding what you need, the part that does pertain to you is getting in everyone elses way as it isn’t relevant to them.

Ok, so enough on why Excel is the crux of all BI evil. In the next posts of this series, I’ll take a serious look at how we can retire the shotgun approach of information delivery and find a good sniper for the job.

-Chris