Extreme Budgeting: Pushing Excel to Its Limits and Beyond

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About this white paper

The budgeting process has evolved greatly over the last 25 years, not just because our businesses have evolved, but also because in 1979 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc – the world’s first spreadsheet. Since that time, doing budgeting has become synonymous with using a spreadsheet. Today, it is unthinkable to attempt budgeting without using a spreadsheet.

In this guide, “Extreme Budgeting: Pushing Excel to Its Limits… and Beyond,” Applix offers several tips and tricks to squeeze every last bit of power and functionality out of Excel to make your budgeting easier, quicker, and more accurate. We also explain the limits of Excel in coping with today’s planning and budgeting requirements, and provide an overview of Applix TM1, an analytical platform that works in conjunction with Excel to dramatically expand its capabilities and overcome its limitations.

Excel is a powerful and complex tool, and most users – even serious users – are rarely exposed to more than 25% of its functionality. There is much to be said for knowing only what you have to, but there are those rare occasions when you learn something new that can help you do your job better or more easily, and you quickly wonder how you survived so long without knowing it.

Most large organizations know the chaos that ensues when spreadsheets are passed from person to person or department to department – there is no version control, there is little security, and it becomes virtually impossible to know if any two people looking at different copies of ostensibly the same spreadsheet are really comparing apples to apples. There is also no audit trail or recovery of data from hardware or software failures.

TM1 works seamlessly with Excel to augment its functionality, vastly expand its scalability, and provide for capabilities that simply weren’t envisioned in the design of Excel. At the same time, TM1 has been designed specifically to work from within Excel, so there is no need to learn a new application, maintain data in multiple applications, or discard whatever investment has been made in building a budgeting or forecasting infrastructure in Excel.