How many hours a month does your team spend keeping Excel alive?

Excel is not the villain here. It is one of the finest tools ever made and most businesses should keep using it.

The question is narrower. How much time goes into keeping the file working, as opposed to doing work with it?

What maintenance looks like

Somebody sorted a range without the rest of the columns and now a hundred rows have the wrong party against them.

Two people worked on it on the same afternoon and there are now two versions, each with something the other does not have, and an hour goes into merging them by eye.

A formula broke in March. Nobody noticed until June, and three months of reporting was slightly wrong in a way nobody can now reconstruct.

And every month somebody spends half a day building the summary by copying numbers out of it into another sheet, by hand.

Where the line actually is

Excel is right when one person owns the file, the data is small enough to see, and being slightly wrong is survivable.

It stops being right at a specific point: when more than one person needs to change it at the same time. Everything above is a symptom of that one thing. Shared editing is the problem Excel was never designed to solve, and no amount of discipline fixes it.

So the useful question is not whether to move off Excel. It is which of your files have more than one author. Those are the ones costing you.

Look at your most important Excel file. How many people change it, and how many hours a month go into keeping it correct?

Moving the two or three files that have outgrown Excel, and leaving the rest alone, is how we usually do this. Tell us which file hurts most and we will tell you whether it is worth moving.