A spreadsheet is the right tool while one person keeps it, mistakes are cheap, and nobody needs to work in it at the same time as someone else. Stop relying on it when several people must enter records at once, when different people must see different things, or when a wrong or lost row would cost real money. Size is rarely the reason: Excel holds over a million rows. Shared, important records are the reason.
What spreadsheets are very good at
- Working something out: budgets, quotes, forecasts, what-if questions.
- One person's analysis of data taken from somewhere else.
- Lists that change slowly and are kept by one person.
- Trying out an idea before paying to build it.
If that describes your use, keep the spreadsheet.
The real limits
| Tool | Published limit | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Excel | 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns on a worksheet | Few small businesses reach it. Files become slow and fragile long before. |
| Google Sheets | Up to 20 million cells or 100MB for a spreadsheet | Good at sharing. Slows down well before the limit when formulas are heavy. |
The limits that matter are not in those numbers. A spreadsheet cannot easily stop two people overwriting each other, show each person only their own rows, force a value to be one of a list everywhere, or record who changed what.
What research says about errors
A review of the research on spreadsheet quality, published in the journal Frontiers of Computer Science in 2024, covered more than 35 years of journal articles. A press summary of it reported that 94% of spreadsheets used in business decision-making contain errors. The figure comes from the studies the authors reviewed, not from a new count, and it covers all kinds of mistakes, small and large. The lesson is not that spreadsheets are bad. It is that a spreadsheet nobody checks should not be the only basis for an important decision.
Eight signs you have outgrown one
- There are several copies and nobody is sure which is current.
- More than three or four people need to enter records at the same time.
- Only one person understands the file, and the business stops when they are away.
- Some people should not see some rows, and currently they can.
- A formula was overwritten and nobody noticed for weeks.
- Staff need to add records from a phone, in the field.
- The same information is typed into the sheet and into another system.
- A wrong or deleted row has already cost money or a customer.
One sign is a warning. Three or more mean the file is doing a database's job.
Before you leave: fix the file
Many spreadsheet problems are problems of layout, and cost nothing to fix. Keep one shared copy online, use one row per record, lock the formulas, use drop-down lists, and separate the sheet where people type from the sheet that shows totals. The six fixes, step by step.
The steps between a spreadsheet and custom software
- A form in front of the sheet. A free form tool stops people typing straight into the data and gives every entry a date.
- A ready-made product for your kind of business, if one fits. Build or buy.
- A small record system built around your one main record. Ours start at N$6,499.99 and keep an Excel export.
Moving without losing anything
- Clean the sheet first: one row per record, no merged cells.
- Load it into the new system and compare the row count and two or three totals.
- Run both side by side for two weeks.
- Keep the old file, read-only, as the archive.
- Poon, Lau, Yu and Tang: Spreadsheet quality assurance: a literature review. Frontiers of Computer Science 18 (2024)
- Newswise: Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors (13 August 2024)
- Microsoft Support: Excel specifications and limits
- Google Drive Help: Files you can store in Google Drive