Spreadsheets

Are Spreadsheets the new filing cabinets?

“You can’t grep dead trees” implies that paper documents are not dynamic and hard to search, but should we go further and suggest that filing cabinets are where documents go to die? Documents in a filing cabinet are:
  • Retrievable only through reference to a single linear index (unless someone creates a cross reference)
  • Often only accessible to one viewer at a time
  • Subject to the whims of their guardians
So much so that paper documents are being recognised as liability in organisation - certainly a cost to store and retrieve.

However, business’s obsession with the spreadsheet may be creating the new filing cabinet filled with spreadsheets on file servers. Read More...