If you have made it as far as reading this sentence, I hope that it means you were not put off by the fact that spreadsheets are the theme! My brother and sister are both employed in the financial sector, and they love a spreadsheet. I’m not so keen. We had a bit of back-and-forth last week when we were discussing what we would all contribute to help our mum out on Christmas Day. Who’s making dessert, who’s bringing crackers, etc. One of them said, ‘I’ll fire up a spreadsheet’ (saddo), to which I replied, ‘nah, a SharePoint List is better’. Ha ha, I nearly started a war!
Someone said a while ago, “a spreadsheet is for numbers, it shouldn’t be used for tracking things”. This bold statement got me thinking. I’ve always used spreadsheets for tracking progress in projects – action plans, benefits realisation, etc. I’ve seen spreadsheets that are extracts from system reports that people have then kept up to date themselves, spreadsheets for this and for that. We all have them, but are they the best tool to use?
Recently, I have started to prefer using SharePoint Lists over a spreadsheet. My colleagues and I have also been making more use of Lists in the work that we do as a team and I thought it might be useful to share some of what we use these for and how they work. I know Lists are not that new, but it is only in the past year or so that we have been using them widely. I am now at the point where I actually prefer lists to spreadsheets.
We have been making some changes in our Directorate recently and have moved almost all of our meetings (including agendas), our Daily Stand Up, Benefits tracker, CI Activity tracker all onto SharePoint lists. Previously, we used excel, or Trello (which we paid for) but we discovered that Lists could do a lot of what we were looking to do without the subscription, or it could replace excel, with the added bonus of automation and integration with Microsoft (MS) Forms.
Our Daily Stand Up (DSU) agenda is a SharePoint List embedded in a SharePoint page. This List, along with several other Lists, integrate to enable us to link up our rota, resource plan, improvement ideas, lessons learned, successes and recognitions. This works quite well now, and my colleague, Jacquelyn O’Brien, has been able to use Power Automate to seamlessly move things from one part of a list to another, or to move an item from a list to Planner. It seems that what is possible is actually quite endless.
We also had a large Benefits tracker that was on Excel, and another spreadsheet that tracked the activities that we were all working on. I know that you can report from excel, I know that you can use it in a Power BI dashboard, but it is not always that easy. Any change to a spreadsheet can really mess up a dashboard. There have been times when I have been stuck in a spreadsheet in a loop of that no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get out of. Surely, I am not the only one? It is easy to perform a sort and then completely mess up the data without realising it. And recently, I have been in a spreadsheet that several other people are using, and their actions are impacting mine – especially with the filtering and not picking ‘see mine’! Very frustrating!
Using Lists lets you easily set up different levels of access and permissions. For example, the owner of the List can add/delete/change columns and can give others the same abilities, but you can give people access to just change items without being able to change columns. You can even just give access to just view and not edit anything. It gives reassurance but also saves you time having to fix structures.
Power BI Dashboards have also supported the use of Lists in our Directorate. We have a few dashboards that we regularly use. A weekly one that pulls in several Lists into the one space that gives us a fantastic overall picture of the activities we are working on, our improvement ideas and training evaluations to name just a few. You can create a dashboard from excel, but there are so many more things that can go wrong. Another thing that is not possible when using excel in Power BI is that you can’t enable automatic refreshing of dashboards like you can with Lists. My preference is definitely now leaning towards a SharePoint List.
If you want to know any more or would like to learn how to use any of the tools mentioned in this blog, reach out to me (susan.ali@strath.ac.uk) or the team (continuous-improvement@strath.ac.uk). We would be happy to help you get started.
