It’s a recognised fact: the world runs on Microsoft Excel. Try finding a commercial decision that doesn’t have a spreadsheet lurking behind it. It might be just a few cells of best-guess numbers, or it might be dozens of sheets, filled to the brim with rigorously assembled data from business units across the world. Excel is powerful. Excel is flexible. However, the flip side of that flexibility is the potential for chaos.

In media agencies, many “tools” for planning investment, phasing, reach, and frequency are really just Excel spreadsheets - maybe with a smattering of UI polish, maybe not. Usage instructions are passed down in an oral tradition, with their origins lost in the mists of time. Often, no-one can remember the principles and the logic that was used, let alone how to update the tools for changing circumstances.  They replicate like digital weeds - emailed, copied, renamed, buried in arcane folders like M:\Media\Team X\Dave G\Jan 2009\Media Tool\Old\Version 2. And heaven forbid that you ever find a flaw in the calculations, because attempting to fix every copy in circulation is beyond impossible.  

You might think the new world of data science would be better. But in some ways, it can be worse. With Excel, at least you have a spreadsheet to open and there’s always the outside chance that you see something that looks wrong. How many Python scripts are set to work with zero oversight on whether they are doing what is expected? How many Jupyter notebooks are left scattered around the organisation with little in the way of project documentation? Problems can quickly become deep-rooted.

At ToolUp, we do things differently. We build proper software tools to commercial standards using professional developers. We build modern, secure, cloud-based systems to ensure that your data is protected, to ensure that your teams are using the right versions and to enable them to make best use of their time.

If you are sitting on fragile Excel sheets or ghost-code tools you can’t trust or maintain, we can help. We can bring your tools up to the ToolUp standard or develop new tools to meet your business needs far more effectively. Just get in touch.