The Power To Go Beyond Excel
In the Fall of 2020, I finally decided to develop my programming skills beyond Excel. I had reached the limit of using Excel as a management tool for our business. The internal and external demands for greater transparency with ever increasing speed compelled me to search for a better solution.
Five years earlier I read Paul Ford's excellent piece, "What is Code?". This article had a profound influence on my thinking about code, computers and technology. I had always been a willing and enthusiastic consumer of new technology, but it wasn't until I read this article that I could picture myself creating in the space. I was otherwise intimidated by coding, but the article challenged me to think about the Excel formulas I had worked with as a type of coding, and it empowered me to think about other ways to expand my skills and develop new solutions for business. It also demystified the topic of computers by explaining that a computer will only do exactly what a human tells it to do. The challenge in coding is speaking the language of the computer and learning to write logically, absent of human assumptions.
Since then, I played around with learning the Python programming language which was a fun experience. But I realized that there was a lot more that I would need to learn before I could develop a mature enough product for use in our company. There had to be a better way. By the time Fall 2020 rolled around, I reacquainted myself with low-code. In my particular case I latched onto Microsoft's Power Platform, but there are many other low-code options out there.
If you are not familiar with low-code, it places the power of coding in the hands of those closest to the real world business problem. It is a system that allows you to develop apps and automations without learning computer science. You can develop an app in less than a day using data stored in an Excel file, Smartsheet, Sharepoint List or a relational database.
I first created an app to track our bid opportunities that became a single source of truth on the topic, and it was accessible to everyone who needed the information. Originally, opportunities were tracked in an Excel spreadsheet that had morphed over the years. It was a comprehensive list in Excel that provided a lot of detail, and it even reduced a lot of double date entry. But moving the process to Power Apps allowed for greater access to information when away from my computer (such as when walking into a client's office or on a jobsite), single data entry, and automations reduced time to complete repeated tasks. Key bid information was available exactly when and where it was needed.
Like any new venture, it can be, and it was, intimidating at first. I stumbled through incorrect assumptions and general frustrations. For me, it was very challenging to think about a computer as an inanimate object that can only do exactly what you tell it to do. As consumers, we are so accustomed to software and devices anticipating our thoughts and needs. But when you sit down to start programming and telling a computer what to do, you quickly realize that the computer is not intelligent, it's all code done by a person just like you (which is a big take-away from "What is Code?"). The fun part is recognizing that you are now capable of creating a system that can delight its users.
Since making the pivot away from Excel in 2020, I have developed a few different apps and I am currently working on a single app to unite them all. The features in the app allow us to manage our projects from a single source of truth and it has reduced a lot of the confusion and side conversations. We are not there yet (is there ever really a "there"), but we continue on the journey of making our processes better by pushing the repeatable tasks onto the computer, freeing up our colleagues' brainpower to focus on building.