Excel is Pain in the Proverbial - Part 1

Why are there two versions of the spreadsheet?

Microsoft has done a great job in recent years of improving the user experience in Office 365.  So good in fact that it seems to have given new impetus for users to try and use it for everything.

Trust us, we know how easy it is to get sucked into it - it happened to us too.

Before you know it, we 're doing regular downloads from Odoo to csv files, importing them to Excel, apply some fancy formula and creating a chart.  It was all just busy work.

It didn't take long for things to go wrong.

"Who created v2 of the spreadsheet? I've been updating the first version for days" and "Why does the formula look different half way down the sheet?" 

It might seem strange for an Odoo integrator to be admitting this, but the Excel trap is such an easy one to fall into - even for us.

So we called a time-out on Excel and project MEGA (Make Excel Go Away) begun.

Project MEGA consisted of 4 main steps:

  1. Gather the spreadsheets and map the fields

  2. Create the views in Odoo

  3. Import the data

  4. Ensure adoption

In our next post we'll show you how we got to grips with the existing spreadsheets.

Read Part 2 - We're going to need a bigger whiteboard

Share this post
Sign in to leave a comment