The world economy runs on Excel and copy-paste. A scary thought, but one we’ve seen firsthand at i.DO.
We deploy work management solutions like Asana, and we’ve worked with banks, government agencies, non-profits, marketing companies, luxury brands… Every single one of them relies heavily on Excel. And more than that, they rely on people copy-pasting things all day long. It’s crazy.
What’s even crazier is that if a company puts in place the right processes, with the right people using the right tools, they can completely outsmart the competition. They can be twice as efficient, with teams no longer overwhelmed all the time.
And even just that—having a team that isn’t overwhelmed—changes everything. Turnover gets closer to zero. People stay longer, they’re happier, they do better work. Clients are happier. And maybe, in the end, the world gets a little better too.
This is one of the scary truths we’ve uncovered, working with companies all over the world.
@Bastien_Siebman I hear this almost everyday here at StreamWork. It’s great to show them how StreamWork and Asana work seamlessly to streamline the creative review processes and get them out of Excel.
Yes, It’s absolutely crazy. Some organisation is still stuck with Excel files and endless email chains. It’s frustrating, but sadly, it’s the reality we live in.
People don’t like change. Even when you bring them a better, more efficient solution, they cling to their habits. What’s worse is that the resistance often comes from the top. Many of those in senior positions were trained on Microsoft tools 20 or 30 years ago, and they’ll never change.
So we keep receiving emails with Excel files attached, over and over again…
But maybe things will slowly improve with the new generations coming in.
It is scary indeed. Especially when the intent is very good and lots of controls are put in place to ensure good outcomes are delivered, yet, very few pause and think: is this the best way to do things, or is this the best tool to use?
It amazes me how many tools I use that can export a CSV file with column headers and row data, but don’t offer in-platform reporting that mimics the flexibility of an Excel pivot table: Use any column’s data as a filter, row, column, or cell value. It’s always just a bunch of prebaked reports and dashboards that never quite get at what I specifically need to know, and now everything is moving towards asking me to just trust an AI to summarize the data for me. Just let me make a dang pivot table on live data, instead of having to export and download snapshots on a regular basis and append the contents to an increasingly large, slow Excel workbook that is needlessly duplicating all the data that already lives inside the tool!
I’d consider that adding more List tab views and configuring each with desired Filter, Sort, and Group choices is Asana’s version of pivot tables. Have you tried that?