Since the beginning of work management, one tool has dominated business processes; Microsoft Excel.
You can use Excel to store almost any data, whether it relates to employees, customers, supporters, or training attendees. It’s also used to manage operations for day-to-day activities, manage your business’s finances, and keep track of spending habits.
The biggest obstacle regarding Excel is that you have to learn how to use it. Between the heavy manual setup from scratch, collaboration being very difficult, and most businesses needing someone to know how to use it to maximise its capabilities, it can quickly become a business nightmare.
But fast forward to now, and the rise of work management tools, and we have monday.com; a tool designed specifically around a low code/no code automation mentality, with ease of use and collaboration at its heart.
But when there is already an established tool like Excel why would you switch?
monday.com is a Work OS
What is a Work OS? A Work OS (work operating system) provides flexibility to buildprovides flexibility to build and adapt to any workflow, project, or process, regardless of organisation, size, and scope. It’s geared for companies of all sizes and across all departments.
Use automations to do the grunt work
The main difference between monday.com and Excel is automation. While Excel does provide an automation function, it’s very limited compared to what monday.com can do.
monday.com has thousands of automations for multiple templates and apps from marketing to sales. It cuts down on manual labour and helps you get the job done more efficiently. Macros within Excel can be powerful to use but can be cumbersome as they capture almost every move you make while inputting data. This allows you to then ‘replay it’ in order to have the workbook complete the exact same actions on its own. This can be tricky, and time-consuming to correct if you accidentally include a wrong button click or movement. In monday.com you have almost limitless possibilities with either prebuilt automations, or the new custom automations feature which acts like a light workflow manager for chaining together multiple actions from one trigger. monday.com is built for users of any skill level, with workflows that can be set up instantly.
Struggling to get started? Use monday.com templates for inspiration
monday.com has a wealth of templates in its library designed by real users in the community that have prebuilt boards, columns and, in some cases, views and automations that really kick start your monday.com experience.
Some examples are:
Expense tracking template
If you need to track your company’s expenses, then monday.com’s expense tracking template is a great option. The template doesn’t require any coding skills or previous accounting experience. The template simply arranges your bills in columns and fills in the information. The template is designed in a way that can be utilised by companies of any size. You can quickly rename the labels and columns, and you’ll have a customised template. This template has automated alerts that make it easy to set up reminders that will let you know if a specific payment is overdue or coming up.
Daily tracker template for tasks
monday.com’s daily tracker template allows you to get a clear view of what needs to be done to improve the way your team works. You can share your dashboard with teammates and other groups so that they can add items, give updates, and more. Furthermore, you can import Excel data into this monday.com for an easy transition. That means in just a few steps, you can make your spreadsheet into a lovely monday.com board.
CRM template
Using the CRM template, you can handle customers the way you want, without any need for coding skills or programming knowledge. You can easily add customer details and use the template without any alteration. That means no more searching through countless spreadsheets to look for specific data. The CRM template covers multiple bases with colour-coded columns. By integrating monday.com with the tools you already use, the CRM template can sync all of your data into one central place. This means you’ll never have to hunt through an endless Excel spreadsheet of your leads ever again.
Import any spreadsheet from Excel
The thought of moving all your data over to monday.com can seem daunting but fear not as you can import your spreadsheets straight into monday.com.
Importing is as easy as dragging and dropping the file in from Excel into monday.com. The platform will then do all the work for you. monday.com creates a new board with the data structured exactly as you had it. Then, you can have all the benefits of managing your spreadsheets with a Work OS such as extra collaboration features staying updated in real-time, and creating transparency so everyone’s on the same page.
Integrates with your current tools
With the integrations in monday.com you can connect your current business systems. This could be enriching your data with information from a CRM, automate emails to clients or push contacts to a marketing segment.
With its flexible API, monday.com allows you to integrate other tools in your ecosystem so it can truly be the central nervous system in your business.
When it comes to spreadsheet software, Excel is a business giant that does what it does well. However, if you are looking to have an easy-to-use, centralised place to manage your work and connect together your other business tools, monday.com is the right choice.
If you want to learn more or need any help transitioning from Excel to monday.com please contact us.
