Replace a Manual Process with Software

Raymond Panko's review of fifteen years of spreadsheet research found spreadsheet errors to be common and non-trivial, and that the one fix shown to work so far is inspecting the formulas cell by cell.

A manual process is work a person repeats by hand, often in a spreadsheet. Microsoft's published specifications limit an Excel worksheet to 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns.

Replacing a manual process means moving its rules from a person's habits into an application with a database. I build those on .NET and SQL Server.

Panko's review says that after fifteen years of research, spreadsheet errors are common and non-trivial, and that so far only one method, inspecting the formulas cell by cell, has been shown to work.

Excel allows 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per worksheet. If the process already keeps data across many files or sheets to stay under a limit, that is a measurable sign the data has outgrown the tool.

My architecture follows established patterns from Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Gregor Hohpe's Enterprise Integration Patterns, so your next developer, or an AI coding tool, can pick up where I left off.

Consider a simple scenario. If one person is the only one who knows how the spreadsheet works, the process stops whenever that person is away or leaves. Moving the rules into an application you own means the process no longer depends on one person's memory.