[hjk05]

Your strengt is your weakness is your strength. Spreadsheets excel at ad-hoc things because they aren’t systems, they don’t have restrictions and limitations on what data you can pull in or where you store it or what you calculate. They are horrible for all the same reasons, people end up spending tons of time semi manually joining up data from different sheets and copy pasting numbers from emails into calculations. The sheets take on a life of their own as they are emailed around between people, and errors like crop up: “oh, I think you have the version of the sheet that doesn’t work in October[real example], that’s got fixed in a version that was sent to Peter, check the mail stream to see who the original was sent to..” And they grow over time without any obvious way of optimizing old dependent calculations so you end up with sheets that do company wide economic calculations but take 10min just to open, so IT ends up setting up batchjobs to open it everyday, copy in new data and generate PDF of results[also real example].

Of cause you can just put systems and rules around your spreadsheet practices and start adding passwords and accompanying documentation of “what you must do when using this document”. But When you get into these situations it’s almost always a better decision to set up an actual system to handle your data.