Why collaborating in Excel is so cumbersome…

Written By Narayan Laksham

Contributions by Rohit Krishnan

The workflow of sharing and collaborating in Excel is a tedious exercise. As the number of collaborators goes beyond two, suddenly variables like isolation, time delay, data integrity, real-time sharing and participant engagements become expensive and hard realities.

A simple example is a budgeting process where an organization runs a 3–6 months exercise primarily because it is sequenced to gather inputs from all departments.

It is not uncommon to see the enterprise employees operating in silos to hold on to critical information. However, when they are ready to share this with their colleagues and ultimately seek interdepartmental data exchange, the general method is sending multiple spreadsheets to different users.

Now the owner of the master spreadsheet needs to wait for the updates to come back from respective collaborators and then consolidate the information from these spreadsheets. This is normally an iterative process which becomes extremely time-consuming.

So what’s the solution?

Excel has been out longer than I can remember. So is there a solution? And if so, why has it taken so long for someone to get there?

Some products have aimed to address this issue, Google sheets being the first to come to mind, but an emerging solution called DiamondLane seems to take the best approach. While the rest of the world is looking at these sheets one-dimensionally, DL presents this three-dimensionally. In a manner of speaking.

DiamondLane is targeted to solve this precise problem. Instead of multiple rounds of emails and consolidation, the emails are sent only once and collaboration starts with storage of data in a centralized server. The concept of transaction chaining in DiamondLane ensures that no transition data is lost and the user can always see the cell history. All of this has long been and continues to be patent protected which is why parent company BoardwalkTech sees the potential for several different enterprise and consumer verticals.

Use cases as simple as managing your family stock portfolio are also covered, further addressing the collaboration issue while exploring different usages and (potentially) underserved use cases.

So stay tuned. More updates on DiamondLane coming soon.

DiamondLane will have a website up shortly where you can download the application!

Till next time.

Thoughts and feedback in the comment section would be appreciated!

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