Software companies love telling you spreadsheets are bad. We don't agree. A spreadsheet is one of the most useful tools ever made, and plenty of well-run businesses depend on them. The real problem is narrower than that. It's copies.
How the copies breed
It starts innocently. The job list gets emailed to an engineer, who saves it and adds a column. The office carries on editing the original. Someone downloads it to filter by site. By Friday there are four versions and each one is partly right.
Why it gets worse as you grow
With two people, copies are annoying. With fifteen they're a risk. Customers get chased for invoices they've paid. Engineers turn up to jobs that were cancelled. The owner makes decisions from numbers that were out of date a week ago.
Shared online spreadsheets help, partly
Putting the file online so everyone edits one copy is a genuine improvement. It brings its own problems though. Anyone can delete a column. Everyone can see everything, including costs and personal details. And editing a thirty-column sheet on a phone in a plant room is miserable.
What you actually need
Most operations teams don't need to get rid of spreadsheets. They need:
- one copy of each list, shared by everyone
- forms for adding things, so nobody breaks the structure
- different views for different people
- control over who sees costs and personal details
- a record of who changed what
Keep the data, lose the copies
In OmniSchema you bring your existing spreadsheet in with a CSV import, so you don't start from nothing. After that there's one real list with forms, views and permissions on top. You can still export to a spreadsheet whenever you want to do some analysis. The difference is that the export is a snapshot you play with, not the thing everyone is working from.