SwirrlSpeak

Spreadsheets are great for some tasks. People love the informality, the flexibility and the instant results: in skilled hands, they can be very powerful. But “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. There are many organisations where e-mailing spreadsheets around is the default approach to data sharing and this leads to problems.

As individuals create and save spreadsheets, the files can become scattered around the network, making it hard to find relevant data or to know what exists. Even if you can find it, you probably can’t work out what it means without asking the creator. Assuming the creator still works for you.

Collaboration by e-mail is clumsy and new versions of the document sprout like weeds. No-one knows who did what, or which is the definitive version. A common solution is to share the spreadsheet file on a server, but even then, as lots of data is often stored in just one file, bottlenecks arise as only one person can edit at a time.

And, when it comes to calculations, it is easy to get an answer from a spreadsheet, but as the volume and complexity of data rises, it becomes increasingly awkward to get the RIGHT answer. Debugging and maintenance problems grow until either people are afraid to touch it in case they break it, or it’s time to throw it away and start again. (There’s a good discussion of this here.)

An alternative is to use a relational database and some kind of bespoke application to get the data in and out in a convenient way, but that can be a prohibitively expensive and lengthy route to take, with difficulties of its own.

Spreadsheets are here to stay, but when it comes to sharing data with your colleagues, things can be done better. That’s one of the things we’re hoping to achieve with Swirrl.