Enterprise solutions

One core promise of this book is to build on your existing knowledge of Excel and help you find solutions that are more scalable, robust, and supported by a wider team. By this, we mean the following:

• Scalable: Whatever we build can be used by tens or hundreds of users simultaneously, manipulating a very large dataset.
• Robust/durable: What we build can be left to run by itself, since it won’t easily break and highlights any errors using tests that can be run automatically.
• Supported by a wider team: Most Excel sheets are maintained by only one person. What if they leave? The solutions we build should be understood by many people.

Typically, these are called enterprise solutions. In your organization, you’re likely to have several of these, supported by an internal or external IT team. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Examples of enterprise solutions

We gave an example before of a company using Excel to track...