Misuse of spreadsheets costs European businesses €55 billion a year

Spreadsheets like Excel were never designed to handle complex analytics and big data tasks, but a growing demand for data insights is leading many businesses to waste effort manually handling data in spreadsheets.

A study commissioned by self-service analytics company Alteryx and carried out by IDC reveals that advanced spreadsheet users spend on average nine hours a week on repeat effort manually manipulating data, wasting €10,000 per year. Across Europe this represents, on average, two billion hours of duplicate work, costing an eye-watering €55bn per year (around $64bn).

According to the findings there are 30 million advanced spreadsheet users worldwide, with 5.5 million of them in Europe -- representing about 12 percent of all enterprise employees. On average, advanced spreadsheet users in Europe spend 28 hours per week working in spreadsheets, representing approximately 8 billion hours every year.

The top three uses for spreadsheets are operations/forecast modeling (49 percent), data visualization (44 percent) and ad-hoc data analysis (38 percent). But 95 percent of people preparing data for visualization will fail to get the information desired from their business intelligence visualization tools, forcing them back into spreadsheets for further analysis.

"Organizations can improve self-service data preparation and analysis for fast and actionable results," says Stuart Wilson, SVP and GM of Europe at Alteryx. "Primarily, any organization still mired in a sprawling spreadsheet situation should consider self-service data preparation software as an alternative to spreadsheets. Secondly, build a business case for self-service data preparation software based on productivity cost savings alone -- €10K/person/year in the EU. Then, expand the business case by highlighting additional benefits including better controls that provide higher levels of data and analysis integrity (trust, availability, security and compliance), and promote collaboration."

You can find out more in the full report which is available from the Alteryx website.

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