Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professionals play a crucial role in driving business growth and helping organizations navigate an ever-changing financial landscape.
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professionals play a crucial role in driving business growth and helping organizations navigate an ever-changing financial landscape.
With the myriad of tools available today, it might seem surprising that many large organizations still prefer Microsoft Excel over newer alternatives like Google Sheets.
In this in-depth exploration, we'll discuss the unique features and capabilities of Excel that make it the go-to choice for FP&A in big companies, and we'll provide real-world examples of its performance advantages.
Especially when it comes to intricate computations and financial modeling, Microsoft Excel provides a more broad range of capabilities and features than Google Sheets does. This is especially true for Google Sheets, more than for any other tool on the market.
Excel has several unique benefits, including the following:
As part of the Microsoft Office Suite, Excel seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft products such as:
Microsoft Excel offers more robust security features, making it a more reliable choice for organizations that need to comply with stringent data protection regulations. Some security advantages include:
Excel's support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and macros enables FP&A professionals to:
Many finance professionals and industry experts have expressed their preference for Excel over Google Sheets due to its advanced capabilities and reliability. A few case studies include:
.jpg)
Excel has been an industry standard for some decades, making it the tool with which the majority of FP&A professionals are most comfortable working.
To ensure a smooth transition and widespread adoption across departments, companies invest in Excel training for their staff members so that they may become skilled in the program. The widespread prevalence of this familiarity results in:
Microsoft Excel has a wider range of features and tools than Google Sheets, especially when it comes to complex calculations and financial models. This is especially true when you think about how much power and speed bigger companies need to do complex calculations. Excel can easily handle hundreds of thousands of rows of data, while Google Sheets often slows down after about 1,000 rows.
Also, Excel is known for how well it works. With hundreds of built-in functions and an endless number of possible formulas, it should be able to handle any calculation need, no matter how simple or complicated. On the other hand, Google Sheets doesn't have a lot of features.
Excel, unlike Google Sheets, can get data from a wide range of outside sources, such as databases, text files, Excel files, and cloud services. Especially Excel's Power Query add-in makes it easy to import data and shape it in a way that makes it ready for analysis. When it comes to importing data, Google Sheets is much less flexible.
Excel lets you record macros that turn into Excel VBA, which is by far the most popular programming language in the world. The macros can automate jobs that you do often, and the code they make is easy to change and improve. The coding environment in Google Sheets, on the other hand, is made for programmers and has a steep learning curve for the normal spreadsheet user.
Excel is used by almost all businesses, which makes it easy to share spreadsheets. Also, importing Excel spreadsheets into Google Sheets can cause formatting mistakes that need to be fixed. One FP&A manager said that if Excel were a language, it would have close to 1 billion speakers, making it one of the biggest in the world. So you can be sure that if you use Excel, you'll be in very good company.
Excel does have a few shortcomings though: It's easy to do something wrong. It's also hard for a large team to share a spreadsheet, combine all the different versions, and figure out which one is the most correct.
Microsoft Excel remains head and shoulders above its rivals in terms of performance in the field of financial planning and analysis (FP&A), despite the fact that Google Sheets provides a more intuitive and collaborative experience for users.
Large enterprises typically opt for this solution because of its superior features and functionalities, including easy connection with other Microsoft products, extensive security measures, and the capability to be customized. Excel's extensive history in the corporate sector and the widespread familiarity of the software among its users further solidify its position as the tool of choice for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) specialists.
Large corporations are in need of tools that provide both power and flexibility in order to compete in today's fast-paced and more complex financial world.
FP&A professionals who want to drive growth and steer their firms through an uncertain future continue to rely on Microsoft Excel as the gold standard because real-world examples of success and expert opinions supporting its continuous relevance both support its continued relevance.
