5 Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Excel

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides they’ve outgrown Excel. It happens gradually. The file gets a little slower. A formula breaks and nobody notices for a week. Someone emails the wrong version to a client. Then one day you’re staring at a spreadsheet with 47 tabs and a pit in your stomach.

Here are five signs that moment is approaching — or already here.

Sign 1: Your Files Are Getting Physically Large

When an Excel file crosses the 10MB mark, you’re in the danger zone. Past 20MB, you’re living on borrowed time. The symptoms are obvious: slow to open, slow to save, slow to calculate. Filters take seconds instead of milliseconds. Your laptop fan kicks on when you open a workbook.

This happens because Excel was designed for analysis, not storage. When you’re using it as a database — thousands of rows of customer records, years of transaction history, inventory logs — you’re pushing it past its design envelope.

The real risk isn’t the slowness. It’s corruption. Large Excel files crash. They corrupt during saves, especially on network drives. And unlike a real database, there’s no automatic recovery. If that file corrupts on a Friday afternoon and your last backup is from Tuesday, you’ve lost three days of work.

Sign 2: Version Control Is a Fiction

You know the drill. Quote_FINAL.xlsx. Quote_FINAL_v2.xlsx. Quote_FINAL_v2_ACTUALLY_FINAL.xlsx. Quote_FINAL_v2_ACTUALLY_FINAL_Dave's_edits.xlsx.

It’d be funny if it didn’t cost businesses real money. When multiple versions of the same file exist, you get:

• Conflicting data — two people updating different copies, then trying to reconcile
• Lost work — someone overwrites a newer version with an older one
• Wrong decisions — a manager makes a call based on last week’s numbers because someone sent the wrong file

Some teams try to solve this with SharePoint or OneDrive. That helps with basic version history, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem: a spreadsheet has no concept of who changed what, when, and why. It just has “the current state.”

Sign 3: The Formula Spaghetti Is Out of Control

Every growing spreadsheet follows the same arc. It starts clean — a few simple formulas, clear layout, easy to follow. Then someone adds a VLOOKUP. Then a nested IF. Then an INDEX-MATCH-MATCH that references three other sheets. Then a macro to handle the edge case where a customer has tiered pricing.

Eventually, nobody fully understands how the spreadsheet works. Not even the person who built it. Especially not the person who built it, because they built it incrementally over three years without any documentation.

This is the formula spaghetti problem. And it’s dangerous because errors hide. A broken formula in row 247 doesn’t throw an alarm. It just quietly gives you the wrong number, and that wrong number flows into other calculations, into reports, into decisions.

Sign 4: You Have No Audit Trail

A client calls and asks why their price changed from last quarter. Your sales manager opens the pricing spreadsheet and… has no idea. The number is different, but when did it change? Who changed it? Was it intentional or an accident?

In a proper system, every change is logged with a timestamp, a user ID, and ideally a reason. In Excel, changes just happen. The cell value is whatever it is right now. The previous value is gone.

Some people turn on Track Changes, but it’s limited, unreliable in shared workbooks, and most users turn it off because it’s annoying. It’s not a real audit trail — it’s a bandaid.

For businesses in regulated industries, this isn’t just inconvenient — it’s a compliance risk. If you need to demonstrate who approved a price change or when a record was modified, Excel can’t help you.

Sign 5: Multi-User Access Is a Constant Battle

Excel was built for one person at a time. Yes, there’s “shared workbook” mode. Yes, there’s co-authoring through Microsoft 365. But anyone who’s tried these with complex, formula-heavy workbooks knows the reality: merge conflicts, lost edits, and the dreaded “file is locked for editing by another user.”

The workaround most teams land on is worse — they just email copies around. Now you’re back to the version control problem from Sign 2, plus the delay of waiting for someone to finish their edits and send it back.

When your business needs five people to access the same data throughout the day — updating quotes, checking inventory, logging jobs — a spreadsheet isn’t a shared tool. It’s a bottleneck.

What to Do About It

Not every sign means you need to rip out Excel tomorrow. Here’s a practical approach:

Signs 1-2 (file size and version chaos): You might get more runway by moving to Google Sheets, splitting large files into linked workbooks, or using SharePoint with proper check-in/check-out discipline. These are real solutions that cost nothing.

Sign 3 (formula spaghetti): Consider an audit. Map out every formula chain in your critical spreadsheets. Document what they do. You might be surprised how many are redundant or broken. Sometimes cleaning up the spreadsheet buys you another year or two.

Signs 4-5 (audit trails and multi-user): These are structural limitations. No amount of Excel cleverness fixes them. If you genuinely need multi-user access with audit trails, you need a system designed for that — whether it’s an off-the-shelf tool or something custom-built for your workflow.

The key is being honest about where you are. Excel is one of the most powerful tools ever built. But it’s a general-purpose tool, and at some point your business needs something specific.

Recognising these signs early means you get to plan the transition on your terms, instead of dealing with it as a crisis when a critical file corrupts the night before a board meeting.