Most common & most unusual forms of Excel abuse?

A recent thread asking about how to make Excel one's default newsreader has prompted me to follow through on that which I've been ponderin' fer a while.

Most of us have seen Excel used in many situations where another application would have been a better fit. We all see it used for storing massive tables that rightfully should be in Access. We've all seen it used to write letters instead of Word. But around my workplace, the most common abuse of Excel that I see is to use it when PowerPoint should be the tool of choice. I'm not talking about charts. I can forgive anyone that wants to use Excel to show his charts in a meeting. I mean other cases involving shapes or bullet lists, clip art, etc. Around here the most common Excel-instead-of-PowerPoint abuse is flowcharting. I cannot begin to guess how many process flows I have seen drawn on worksheets instead of slides. My favorites are when the person did not use shapes, but rather merged cells and used borders to create the boxes (I can only image trying to move them suckers around when you need to add or delete a step). Even better is when they also leave gridlines visible so the whole thing looks a fright.

So what is the most common form of Excel abuse that you witness?

For a bonus, if you have seen or heard of a particularly horrid or unusual misuse of Excel please share that too. (I'm not talking the most creative good use. I'm talkin' "it-was-a-bad-idea-from-the-start" stuff.)

Are you sure about this? I was taught to use Visio for flow-charting, and it was a nightmare, perhaps out of my ignorance as to how Visio works. I tried to set up multiple tabs, kinda like Excel Worksheets, every time I opened the file, everything moved!

However, with Excel, flow-charting is a dream. Using Autoshapes with automatic connectors and all of that, of course. Excel's the best program I've ever used for such a task, it certainly didn't feel like abuse. If Excel's wrong for this task, I don't want to be right.

A point of clarification - are we speaking to the presentation or mapping the flow?

I left Visio out because it's not part of the standard office suites. You have to buy it separately and consequently only a handful of people have it. I never had access to it until I became an MS MVP. I played around in Visio 2007 and it looks like they've repurposed it a bit (at least from what I understood was its former focus). Still can be used for process flows, of course. But seems more for mapping networks or other types of data mapping stuff now-a-days.

As far as process flows goes, yeah, I'm sure. Maybe if you want to do some big monster process flow that you could only print out using the engineering department's plotter, then okay, I can see using Excel because you have a huge canvass to draw on. But we've all been in meetings where nobody more then 8' from the screen can read anything on the flow chart because the presenter has stuffed way too many steps onto one screenful. For presenting flowcharts in meetings, I do think PowerPoint is the proper tool. *Especially* if they did as I describe above and failed to use shapes to create the flowchart.

Oh I like Visio! I'm with Truby on this, my experience of flow charts in Excel is that they are messy. I get what you are saying Nate, about connectors, and I would prefer Excel over say powerpoint or word for flow charting, but for me Visio offers so much more. And of course flow charts drawn in Visio can be embedded into powerpoint.

Powerpoint is, IMHO, a horrible application. Or rather, the way people use it is particularly nasty. Too many over-enthusiastic users end up cramming the slides full of animation. Yuk! I don't like slides, I want spreadsheets where I can scrutinise every number presented. That is provided the authors don't turn all formula's into constants! For me, it's all about transparency. I much prefer to pull up a spreadsheet on the big screen - that way I can satisfy questions over the integrity of the results presented.

But where I work, the most likely abuse of Excel is choice to use it over MS Access. Not enough of my colleagues understand Access, and not enough know that data can be housed in Access and summary tables used in Excel linked to that Access data.

Furthermore, I think Excel is abused where it is used to track and maintain budgets and forecasts that rightfully belong in the ERP system (in our case SAP). Sure, Excel is a great toold for the development of budgets and forecasts, but once developed they should be loaded to avoid messy consolidations of actuals and budget / forecast data.

Greg Truby said:

I left Visio out because it's not part of the standard office suites.

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Greg, is the same not true of Access ?
EDIT: and FrontPage for that matter... I thought there were only available under certain licences as opposed to the bog standard ?

DonkeyOte said:

Greg, is the same not true of Access?

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Luke,

Access, at least, is included in Office Professional and Office Ultimate. Visio is not in any of the office packages.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX101635841033.aspx?ofcresset=1

Guilty as charged m'lud

I've used Excel to draw flowsheets and even pretty complex process diagrams with tanks, pumps, valves and so on. Those little light grey rectangles make it soo easy to get things lined up

I've used Excel as my webbrowser cos then it looks like I don't have tinternet open at work (well, in case anyone looks at my taskbar). It worked for a while before people realised I wasn't being quite as dedicated as they thought...

One thing I really use to hate was Excel charts. I remember in High School we had to create a spreasdsheet and then create a chart to display our findings. Well I couldn't get the dang on thing to look how I wanted to in Excel 97 maybe 2000? So I just brought up paint and made my own chart with the data series and labels and everything that I felt Excel should have been able to do. I ended up getting an A and having the teacher display my chart, showing what magnificent things Excel can do.

I have not been around enough to see these abuses... but the funnist things I have seen excel used for is as a paper ledger.
I witnessed a person actually calculate a number with a tape calculater then input the result into excel..........

So in my case I would have ticked "they should have used a calculator"??