They’d spent so many long nights working together — a young, dynamic startup founder and a freshly filled-out spreadsheet. The founder had sobbed and smiled and the spreadsheet was there through it all, with a twinkle in cell I5. It wasn’t romantic, but… it was a strong bond.
This is a loving relationship many startup leaders know well. Humberto Ayres Pereira, founder and chief executive of Rows, a startup working on a next generation spreadsheet, says every startup likely uses a spreadsheet of some form.
“If you’re not using spreadsheets, you really don’t have a canvas,” he says. “Everyone uses notetaking of some form, everyone uses checklists, everyone uses email, everyone uses a calendar and everyone needs to work with data. That’s where spreadsheets come in.”
But how does software that was created in 1798 still hold the key to our hearts? We spoke to experts and founders about how spreadsheets keep their businesses going.
The power of love… and empowering employees
For Pereira, spreadsheets are integral to a business’s success because everyone can use them and they allow people to feel in control of their work.
“I think why people love them is that it’s one of the last pieces of software where people are still in charge,” he says. “If you use all these other tools, you just give your data to something else, you don’t know how it’s processed… with spreadsheets, people feel in control of what they’re doing.”
Pereira says this can be used to empower employees.
“If you use all these other tools, you just give your data to something else, you don’t know how it’s processed… with spreadsheets, people feel in control of what they’re doing”
“We’ve felt from the beginning that we’re solving a technology and productivity problem as much as a communication and collaboration problem,” he says. “If you put power into the hands of your team and give them tools to better work together, they’ll produce more, and they’ll come up with more experiments which will lead to better results.”</…….
Source: https://sifted.eu/articles/a-love-letter-to-spreadsheets/