Workflow clinic: Excel Survey

Recently, a well-meaning person sent a questionnaire about some new software, wanting to know if it was behaving nicely. To be fair, the person did not send an Excel spreadsheet, but there was an Excel mindset causing a lot of work. How can a modern, G Suite enabled company do better? Let's take this as a case study for the next survey that you and I will inevitably send.

The blogger will see you now.

The original workflow

Consists of a Google Sheet that got shared. Each tester was expected to make a copy of the sheet (the original was editable), follow instructions on a first tab, fill out results on a second tab and return the copied sheet.

Front page with instructions

The actual tests to perform

Survey, after tests are done.

How to improve this workflow

Collaborate: Step up into the G Suite mindset

That means to create a single, shared source of truth and to invite others to collaborate. As the owner, you will maintain control, but you make your life easier by have everybody contribute equally. It goes like this:

Transform the "tests to perform" part into a column layout, so that each tester gets their own column.
Email the testers and attach the file. When Gmail asks you about access rights, choose "can edit". Done!

Giving other people "edit" access does not mean they can delete the file. Only you can do that. Also, Drive and Docs/Sheets/Slides come with built-in version history so you can see who did what and go back to any point in time. There is no risk in letting others edit your files.

You will still be able to correct the file as your testers get to work. And when your deadline expires, you can go to the big green "Share" button and revoke all sharing permissions.

The same layout, but now with a column layout. You could also have every tester copy a column for themselves.

There are tiny drawbacks to this: People can see others' submissions (creates peer pressure, which may be good?) and this works within your company only. But if you can live with this - this is the gold standard.

The right tool for the right job

Excel does have a place. It is a spreadsheet program, meant to medium complex calculations and analysis. It is also traditionally an offline tool, although recently some aspects of collaborative editing are being added.

Unfortunately, it is 35 years old and Microsoft could not resist adding far too many bells and whistles for its own good. It is being abused for presentational purposes, for making lists - much like Word is being abused for pasting screenshots.

Excel is not the right tool for collaborating, you would use Sheets for that. But Sheets may not be the best tool either.

Tatsuo Horiuchi, 73, uses Excel to create paintings. Other people use Excel to create surveys. They are all doing it wrong.

Consider Forms

A survey is gathering qualitative data and the best tool for that is usually Google Forms. It is very versatile and has several advantages:

Forms has sophisticated configurations, like if people can submit it once or multiple times and if they can see results or not
Form responses can be anonymous or not
Forms is one of the only tools that can be used to gather data from outside of your company if you allow it (as long as you do not use file uploads, always a popular question in the hardest G Suite quiz)
Forms looks friendly and professional to the person filling it out. It can also be styled more easily than Sheets.
Forms' output is actually a Sheets. So you have the best of both worlds: A friendly interface for the person doing the filling out, and quantitative presentation for you, the data nerd.

If all of this has been terribly obvious to you, I ask you to send this post to someone who is struggling in getting the most out of G Suite. Many of our colleagues do - we live in times of perpetual onboarding. It is examples that make the value of G Suite obvious and the whole new way of working. It is not about substituting one spreadsheet program for another, but the philosophy behind them and the teamwork it unlocks. Thank you for reading!

#strategy #sheetsPublished 2020-08-04 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-08-04 by Holger Matthies.

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