The Spreadsheet Problem
Spreadsheets are excellent for quick, personal calculations. Organizations routinely stretch them far past that: as a shared database, a workflow tracker, an approvals log. That's where the flexibility that makes spreadsheets useful becomes the reason they fail.
Why spreadsheets fail at scale
What it costs when it goes wrong
In 2012, the "London Whale" trading losses, ultimately exceeding $6 billion were compounded by errors in a risk-model spreadsheet, including a manual copy-paste mistake.
— JPMorgan Chase internal task force report, 2013
A spreadsheet error by the organizing committee led to roughly 10,000 more tickets being sold for a synchronized swimming event than there were seats available.
— 2012 London Olympics ticketing
Academic research into real-world spreadsheets has repeatedly found meaningful error rates in spreadsheet formulas once a sheet grows past a trivial size, and most of those errors are never caught before they cause damage.
— Panko et al., spreadsheet error research
A sturdier foundation
Rather than letting a spreadsheet grow into an unofficial database, structured web-app tools let a team keep the same flexibility to define custom fields and forms, while adding what spreadsheets lack:
Validated, typed fields at the point of entry
Full revision history
Safe concurrent multi-user access, no more "who has the file open"
Permissions by group or role, not "whoever has the attachment"
Learn more
See Tiki Trackers for how WikiSuite replaces spreadsheet-as-database with a proper structured data tool.