The Excel that broke on Fridays

The file was called ORDER_CONTROL_FINAL_v17_good.xlsx. It lived in a shared folder named "ORDERS". Inside the folder there were fourteen other versions of the same file. Nobody knew for sure which one was the right one. Maite knew. She had been there eleven years and always opened version 17.

It had forty-two tabs. Sheets with names like "Active clients", "2023 clients DO NOT TOUCH", "Summary", "Summary 2", "Maite's tests". Two hundred-odd formulas cross-referencing data between tabs. Some pointed to cells in other files that no longer existed and returned #REF! in red. Maite had learned to ignore the red cells. She considered them part of the landscape.

The Excel worked. That was the important thing. It tracked orders, stock, clients, suppliers and prices. Five people opened it: Maite, the salesman, the warehouse guy, the woman from the workshop and, sometimes, the manager. Not at the same time, because the file ran on the shared drive and the second user got the "read only" message. The second user would wait. Or call Maite on the internal phone.

—Maite, close it for a minute, I need to log an order.

—Hold on, I'm doing the month-end.

—It's urgent.

—Then wait ten minutes.

Ten minutes here, twenty there. An hour a day spent waiting. Nobody wrote that down.

Friday

On Fridays the Excel broke. Not always. But often enough for the manager to notice. Maite would close the file on a Friday afternoon and on Monday morning, when she opened it, a tab would be blank. Or the prices had shifted one column over. Or the total added up to a number that couldn't possibly be right.

Nobody knew why. The manager suspected the warehouse guy, who entered data by copy-pasting from his phone. The warehouse guy swore he did what he always did. Maite suspected the macro that updated prices, written by a nephew of the previous manager back in 2014. The macro worked 95% of the time. The other 5% it deleted entire columns.

On Monday mornings Maite arrived before anyone else. She opened the file, checked what was wrong, fixed it using the Friday backup she kept aside — on a USB stick, on her desk, between two notebooks — and by nine, when the others arrived, everything looked normal. She had been doing this for four years.

—Why don't we look for another solution, Maite? —the manager asked her once, in the corridor.

—Because it works.

It was an incomplete truth. But it was the only answer possible at that hour of Monday, with the USB stick still warm.

The day Maite called in sick

Maite fell down the stairs at home on a Saturday. She broke her right wrist. The doctor signed her off for four weeks. Four weeks in which nobody knew how to open the file properly, which tabs not to touch, what to do when a red cell appeared, where the USB stick was.

Monday at ten the salesman called the manager.

—We have a problem.

By eleven the manager had accepted two things. First, that Maite wasn't an administrative assistant: she was infrastructure. Second, that the entire company had been operating, for years, propped up by a file that only one person understood. Not on a process, not on a system. On Maite's brain and her USB stick.

Maite came back four weeks later. She had learned to use the mouse with her left hand. The first thing she said, sitting down, was:

—Did you touch anything?

What Excel isn't

Excel is a spreadsheet. It's a magnificent program for doing calculations. It's not a database. It's not an order management system. It's not a CRM. It's not an ERP. It's not stock control. When it's used for that, it works for a while. Sometimes for years. Until it stops working.

And it stops working in the worst possible way: not all at once. Little by little. A wrong cell, a formula that gets dragged, a tab that gets duplicated, a macro that runs twice. Errors that don't warn you, because Excel doesn't warn. Excel does what you tell it to, even when what you tell it makes no sense.

And when Excel holds up the company, Excel's errors are the company's errors. Duplicate orders. Stock that says ten when there are four. Prices applied to the wrong client. Things the client notices before you do.

What changing costs and what not changing costs

A custom tool to replace the Excel costs money. It's not cheap. You have to understand the process, model the data, design the screens, train the people. A two or three month project, depending on size.

But not changing also costs. It costs the daily hour of waiting. It costs Maite's Mondays fixing Friday's damage. It costs the four thousand euros from the order that got entered twice and the client claimed back. It costs the four weeks the company ran on half-power because Maite was out with a broken wrist. It costs the day Maite retires and takes the USB stick and her eleven years of knowing which cells you can touch and which you can't.

The cost of not changing doesn't show up on any invoice. It shows up somewhere else. It shows up when someone, on a Friday afternoon, closes the laptop with a strange feeling in their stomach. That feeling, accumulated over the years, is also a cost. Even if nobody knows how to put it on a balance sheet.

The manager, a month later

The manager called a meeting. Maite was there, and the salesman, and the warehouse guy, and the woman from the workshop. On the table, an open laptop with a screen that wasn't Excel. It was a custom tool. It had three big buttons: "New order", "Find client", "Stock". That was all.

—And the forty-two tabs? —Maite asked.

—Not there.

—And the prices?

—Inside.

—And if it breaks on Friday?

—It doesn't break.

Maite said nothing. She picked up the mouse with her good hand and started moving through the screens. She made a test order. She searched for it. She edited it. She deleted it. It took her four minutes. The same thing in Excel would have taken her fifteen.

—It works —she said.

"It works" was a word Maite used carefully. This time she used it without reservation.

The USB stick was still on her desk, between two notebooks. She picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and put it in a drawer.