Excel® is one of those tools that reminds you of your Swiss Army Knife®. It can search thousands of cells for specific values while simultaneously aggregating and producing a summed result. Need something custom? Need to query a public API? Excel can do it. There really isn’t much that Excel can’t do these days. Its flexibility makes it one of the most popular software applications in the workplace, and in fact, most business processes live and die inside Excel.
However, this flexibility does not come without challenges; even Excel has its limits. No I’m not talking about storage limitations (Excel supports over 1 million rows). I’m talking about a potentially fatal flaw: data trapped inside an Excel workbook. Unfortunately, Excel is not the best collaboration tool. Sure, there are shared drives and SharePoint® for sharing files, but those tools don’t solve the problem of data stuck in Excel. You’re forced to give all or nothing to your colleagues without control over what exact data you share.
That’s where xOverTime comes in. With a cloud database and a handful of basic commands, we empower business users to upload and download data in the format of their choice . Traditionally when you think of a database application you may think of a rigid data warehouse for storage, an expensive BI tool for reporting, a custom web application for entering data… But xOverTime has none of that overhead. Users need only install an Excel add-in to use the tool they already know and love. Additionally, our Web application opens the doors for sharing an entire dataset – just one row or any combination of workbook data – only with the appropriate colleagues. Oh, and it automatically keeps track of ownership and versioning along the way.
At xOverTime we like to say that we fill the gaps of Excel by backing it with the security and data governance of a database. But unlike traditional databases, changing the structure of your data can be done by a business user in Excel in seconds. Combined with some Excel best practices, the xOverTime platform can serve as a golden source for data, collaboration and reporting.
As an xOverTime services leader, I personally have loved seeing the smiles on the faces of our users when xOverTime puts them back in the driver’s seat and we can’t wait to do the same for you! Contact me to chat about how xOverTime can help improve your business processes.