Spreadsheet Hell

Then something unexpected happened: spreadsheets became the victims of their own success. Soon there were spreadsheets everywhere. At one Midwestern organization of 3,000 employees, it was estimated that there existed 250,000 spreadsheets. Another issue that arose was the fact that when a spreadsheet was created, that spreadsheet had very limited accessibility. Only the creator of the spreadsheet and perhaps a few other people knew about the existence of the spreadsheet. Because of this limited visibility of data, the same data was being recreated over and over again in different locations by different people. The way the data was created, the calculations, and the edits made to verify the authenticity of the data all were carried out differently. This lack of discipline in managing data further magnified the miseries caused by spreadsheets.

Another problem involved the scope of data that was contained in the spreadsheet. When an end user sat down to create a spreadsheet...