{"id":1245,"date":"2011-09-30T22:05:13","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T22:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bullhorn.com\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2019-03-02T09:09:53","modified_gmt":"2019-03-01T22:09:53","slug":"5-ways-to-tell-that-you-have-outgrown-excel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bullhorn.com\/au\/blog\/5-ways-to-tell-that-you-have-outgrown-excel\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Ways To Tell That You Have Outgrown Excel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google recently released their Correlate<\/a> tool, which aggregates all the search terms Google users enter in and looks for trends around the other terms used at the same time. If you enter “ATS,” you will see what searches correlate tightly with Applicant Tracking Systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You might be surprised by the results<\/a>. The #6 term searched for in conjunction with Applicant Tracking Systems is “vlookup excel.” In fact, 3 of the top 10 searches are Excel terms! This indicates that ATS users are trying to manage their data using Excel spreadsheets. And they are having trouble doing it because they are asking Google for help.<\/p>\n

At InsightSquared, we have spoken with hundreds of staffing and recruiting firms about how they can use analytics to run their business more efficiently. Many of the decision makers at these firms were using Excel when they probably should have been using something more sophisticated, like a reporting tool. Based on our experience, here are 5 signals that indicate you may have graduated from Excel and should think about a reporting tool so you can keep an eye on your business.<\/p>\n

1. You Have Over 100K Rows Of Data<\/strong><\/p>\n

Excel 2003 and older can only handle up to 65,536 rows. Excel 2007 and later can handle up to a million in theory, but you better have awesome hardware. I would recommend looking for a real reporting suite once you get past 100K rows of data. That may seem like a lot, but it\u2019s not. Consider this:<\/p>\n

5 employees * 50 actions per day * 250 work days in a year * 2 years of data = 125,000 rows<\/p>\n

So, if you have 5 or more employees you are probably starting to outgrow Excel even for basic activity analysis.<\/p>\n

2. You Are Analyzing More Than Two Data Types<\/strong><\/p>\n

The above example was for just activity analysis.<\/p>\n

What if you also want to analyze:<\/p>\n

Revenue data
\nJob orders
\nCandidates
\nEmployees
\nClients
\n\u2026more?<\/p>\n

The effect of adding more input data is multiplicative: working with 50k rows of activity and 10k rows of revenue in Excel will behave more like 500k rows, not 60k. By the time you get to the third data type, your spreadsheet will be so complex that you\u2019ll spend more time troubleshooting it than running your business.<\/p>\n

3. You Are Using Vlookups and Sumifs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Excel has a lot of functions \u2014 329 functions in Excel 2003, and 341 functions in Excel 2007. You\u2019ll need heavy use of these if you want to aggregate and analyze big tables of data.\u00a0 The following are the most relevant for reporting on business data:<\/p>\n