How to Break Free from Excel

Is your company reliant on Excel sheets for business processes, internal operations, or critical calculations? Sophisticated and integrated web-based applications revolutionize how businesses handle data and streamline processes. Transitioning from traditional Excel spreadsheets to web-based applications can positively impact your business operations by improving efficiency, scalability, and overall user experience.

However, extracting requirements from Excel and translating them into a web application is not a trivial task. Excel sheets, especially those with complex calculations and interconnected data, can be difficult to replicate in a web environment. Ensuring the same functionality and accuracy of outputs in the new platform can be a major challenge if not properly considered and executed.

In this blog, you will learn what to expect when you decide to break free from Excel.

Why Shift Away from Excel?

The shift from Excel to a web-based application yields several significant benefits:

• Reliable Data: A centralized database ensures consistent and reliable data, eliminating discrepancies caused by multiple Excel sheets.
• Improved Access Control: A web application provides better control over user access permissions, safeguarding sensitive data and preventing unauthorized changes.
• Streamlined Workflows: A user-friendly web interface streamlines data entry and manipulation, leading to improved workflows and increased productivity.
• Enhanced Data Export and Reusability: A web application facilitates seamless data export and the ability to reuse data efficiently, simplifying reporting and analysis processes.
• Time and Cost Savings: The transition minimizes human errors and improves onboarding for new employees, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
• Scalability and Integration: A web-based application's scalability and compatibility with other systems make it suitable for long-term business growth and seamless integration with future technologies.

Getting Started

Every organization using Excel has a unique set of data, interdependencies and calculations. The intricate and multifaceted nature of data means that transitioning from a static Excel environment to a dynamic web platform is a unique challenge for every company.

To replicate Excel functionalities and ensure the accuracy of outputs, a deep understanding of both the old and new systems is required. First, ensure a thorough analysis of the existing Excel spreadsheets is completed. Customized sheets require careful examination to identify project inputs, calculations, and temporary values that will be crucial in the development of the new web-based application.

It is essential to document everything while analyzing the existing Excel sheets. This allows you to detect any changes that may be added to future versions of the Excel sheets.

Before beginning implementation, tools like Jupyter Notebooks can be used to prototype main formulas and calculations in Python. Customers can review and test those with their own data and give early feedback in the specification phase.

Challenges to Consider

Technical challenges are bound to arise for every project you work on. Common challenges with a project of this type include:

• Complex Domains: Industry-specific domains are unique and specialized for every field. Domains are likely to present challenges and requirements you’re not immediately familiar with.
• High-Precision Computations: Formula-rich projects may require very precise calculations. For example, in a recent project the calculations required 28 decimal places so we shifted from using float to decimals. If not handled correctly, the results could have resulted in rounding errors or computational inaccuracies.
• Dynamic Requirement Updates: Iterative updates from the client, with new versions of the spreadsheet being provided frequently, means the development process must be agile and adaptive. This can introduce uncertainties, especially when trying to maintain consistency in development and ensure that new requirements do not disrupt previously built functionalities.
• Cascading Effects in Excel: Keeping track of the side-effects across Excel worksheets due to changes in a single column value is challenging. Reproducing these intricate links and interdependencies in a web application environment, ensuring no functionality is missed, requires meticulous attention to detail. Dependency maps or flowcharts, detailing how changing one value impacts others, are effective for understanding cascading effects.
• Data Exporting: Converting comprehensive and complex data into a readable and accurate PDF format requires careful handling to ensure data integrity and accurate representation.
• Integration of Multiple Tools: Various tools within an organization need to work seamlessly together. Ensuring smooth data flow between them and maintaining consistency must be considered during the development process.
• Resource Degradation & Augmentation: Simulating and managing resource degradation over time and subsequently handling resource augmentation is a complex task. This requires sophisticated algorithms to ensure accurate predictions and adjustments.
• Versioning & Cloning: Implementing version control and allowing for the duplication of projects adds layers of complexity to the development process, especially when ensuring that all data and functionalities are preserved and replicated accurately.
• Data Storage & Retrieval: With multiple tools and features, the application would have a complex database design. It is important to store high-precision data and ensure its quick retrieval.

These challenges require careful planning, rigorous testing, continuous communication, and iterative development, combined with leveraging domain expertise and best practices in software development to address effectively.

Backend and Frontend Technologies

Selecting the right technologies to execute your project is critical for success. Create a centralized system by opting for a robust backend technology, such as Django, which provides an admin interface for data management and user access control. On the frontend, choose a dynamic framework like React, which provides a user-friendly interface for data entry and manipulation.

Django has a solid base for creating modern web application backends. By incorporating Django REST framework into the stack, the backend will interact with the frontend, facilitating the creation, retrieval, updating, and deletion of data. Additionally, you should add Simple JWT, a JSON Web Token authentication plugin, to ensure only authorized users can access the correct API endpoints.

Development teams can also benefit from automatic API documentation created with drf-spectacular. This tool creates a living documentation for all available API endpoints, provides example requests and responses, and allows testing the API directly in the browser. With drf-spectacular, frontend developers can provide early feedback for the API integration.

The automatic API documentation offers an OpenAPI schema, which can be used to create an API client for your frontend. Next.js offers excellent out-of-the-box features, like advanced routing, route handlers and optimized data fetching.

Comprehensive Documentation

The team should thoroughly document the business process, formulas, and Excel sheet functionalities to understand existing practices and ensure a seamless migration to the web-based application. Detailed documentation also helps with troubleshooting, training, and future modifications.

Using collaborative documentation tools like Dropbox Paper or Google Docs allows everyone in the team to access the documentation right from the start. Embedding external resources, like wireframes for the frontend and links to documentation, will help the team to easily access the information they need. (Sidebar: If you’re interested in wireframing, I recommend this book, Wireframing for Everyone.)

Additionally, creating a table with all required cell information found in each Excel sheet (e.g., data type, incoming references, outgoing references, the formula itself and examples), will help team members better understand the problems you need to solve. By better understanding the problems, team members can develop better solutions for mapping your data into a web application.

Real-Life Data for Testing

Guarantee the success of your new web-based application by utilizing real-life data for testing and understanding the application's inputs and outputs. By doing so, you will ensure accuracy and reliability throughout the system.

To help verify the implementation details with real-life data, integrate Jupyter Notebooks in the backend. It allows you to upload test data sets provided by the customer and compare the results with the Excel sheets.

Implementing automated testing tools will help catch potential issues early in the development process, ensuring a smoother transition between different project phases. Additionally, regular code reviews and audits by team members or external experts can identify potential issues or areas of improvement.

Conclusion

Optimize your overall business performance by replacing Excel's traditionally static environment with a dynamic, interconnected, and more efficient solution tailored to your specific needs. By embracing modern technologies, such as Django for backend development and dynamic frontend frameworks like React, Vue or Svelte, companies can streamline processes, increase efficiency, achieve better control over data, and enhance user experiences.

As businesses continue to evolve, adopting web-based applications remains a pivotal step towards growth and success in the digital age.