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How to Replace Excel?

14 points by cosmodisk ↗ HN
We are getting to a position where the entire business will choke on Excel. We are growing rapidly, large contracts coming in left and right. We deal with the government,so often Excel is all they know. What can I use for quick deployment, multi user access to make it a bit more manageable?

18 comments

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m348e912
It really depends on what you plan on doing with excel. One alternative may be mysql with a solid gui tool to design your database the way you want. https://retool.com/blog/top-5-mysql-gui-tools/

There are SAAS solutions like airtable. https://www.airtable.com/

Hosted and managed databases in AWS, Oracle, and Azure.

As I mentioned it's best to get a good idea on what you're trying to do with excel, there may be a purpose driven web app designed to do exactly what you're looking to accomplish.

parentheses
+1 on both tools. you can go from 0 to well oiled very easily. pick a process and transform it.

knowing both very well, i’ll try to help you choose:

retool is great when your logic and api calls are much more sophisticated. it is more powerful but also less turnkey. i’ve built apps that would have taken me several days in less than an hour and had the degree of control to make the workflow as i wanted it. the widgets are powerful and super configurable. the editing experience is meant for engineers or very savvy technical people with limited engineering experience.

airtable is more turnkey. you can more quickly build basic things. it’s used by a LOT of companies. the widgets and capabilities all work out of the box and are very simple and transparent. if something doesn’t work, it’s not hard to figure out why. the capabilities and how they’re implemented make it easy for non engineers to build a full blown workflow.

both are great so you should pick something medium complexity and try retool and something low complexity and try airtable. this will help you understand what’s going to be best for your company and use cases.

argella
Why? Excel is fantastic. Just use it right.
minimaxir
A central database leveraging OLAP connections within Excel may be a good half-measure.
badrabbit
Don't???

Why would you do this? Do you not have O365? It helps managing docs, collaborating, versioning and DLP.

Excel is very powerful. One of the biggest causes of tech people failing at product innovation is trying to sell a product that excel can already do to an audience that excel is already optimized for.

You may not like it and it may not feel very webby but "it ain't stupid if it works"

Perhaps you can elaborate on how you are choking, chances are O365 is already solving it . Combine Teams+OneDrive+Sharepointonline+MSIP and you have a solution that scales >100K users in a global org.

codingdave
If Excel is choking your business, it is probably not a problem with Excel itself, but with processes and workflow around the data stored in Excel. Maybe migrating to a new tool is the right answer, maybe you just need process improvement. To get an real answer from anyone, you'd need to share a lot of detail on exactly what is going wrong.
creatingvalue
I agree with codingdave here. Need more info on what is causing Excel to fail for you.
creatingvalue
Can you tell us what specifically about Excel is causing you problems? Planning? Analytics? File size? Too long to calculate growing files? If you are facing scaling problems, you should look into SaaS solutions. If you want quick deployment, a smaller, earlier stage SaaS company might give you more flexibility. Or if you are okay with slower deployment, more traditional / established SaaS platform might be the way to go. Happy to recommend a few solution providers depending on your needs. Many newer SaaS companies these days integrates well with Excel these days so you might be leverage a combination of Excel and these new SaaS solutions. Worst case, you can use a service like Zapier or Workato to integrate your Excel with another service using API calls.
passingmagic
If your primary need is to reduce deployment and maintenance pain, Microsoft 365 (previously called Office 365) with Excel online should work well.

I was drawn to your post since I hate how much Excel is abused. People use a spread sheet where a simple table in a word processor or note taking app more than suffices. Unfortunately I see no way out of it. The replacements to Excel - i.e. other spreadsheet products have the same issue. Excel actually is probably the most mature of the lot with plenty of information to troubleshoot issues.

If you have a good dev team, with good UI design and dev skills, as suggested by @m348e912 you could create a quick app to serve specific purposes. You could also look into other low-code app platforms. These solutions may take a bit to do, but the end users will love it if done right.

mikewarot
>entire business will choke on Excel

Why do you blame Excel? Is it personal bias against declarative programming? Is it an anti-Microsoft bias?

How do you know it's not a business process issue bottlenecking things? We need more information to properly address this issue for you.

giardini
Use whatever works best for you but ensure, at the end, that results can be exported in an Excel-compatible format.
matt_s
Without knowing any details, one helpful thing would be to build an app that tracks the metadata about the Excel contents and put some versioning on the files in a cloud provider bucket. Make it easy for users to upload/download files.

Also Sharepoint or whatever it’s called these days provides solutions for this type of thing. If you buy something then it’s just process changes and rollout and not 6 months or a year to build, test, etc.

seektable
Depending on usage scenario, Excel is replaced with:

- process management system, usually web-based, and all business data is stored in the (central) DB. This could be specialized domain-specific solution, or organized with low-code tools like PowerApps, or even own software developed in-house (possibly, with help of outsourcing partner) - BI tools to replace use-cases when Excel is used for reporting/analytics (not data entering)

Migration can involve both these items, or only one of them. For example, if using Excel for data entering is still ok, but for reporting brings to much chaos (no single source of truth, it is possible to 'edit' or open outdated worksheet and have different numbers etc) - you may start with a BI tool that uses 'master' Excel file as a data source.