- Connect your Microsoft Surface Book 2 to external VGA-compatible devices with this Microsoft USB-C to VGA adapter. The USB-C connection attaches easily for simple setup, and the conveniently sized cord lets you easily position a monitor or video projector close by for sharing images or video.
- If you haven't already done the math, that's $4.5 million per year spent on maintaining spreadsheets for a medium business. Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems may carry a hefty price tag, but they can reduce costs over the long run by making related data available to a large number of people and streamlining accessibility, something spreadsheets just can't do.
- Microsoft Office 2019 Home and Student For Windows PC Ideal for Students and families this package provides the essentials and favourite of Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. It is all you need to be an over achiever! With a new modern look, and time-saving features the 2019 Office Home & Student edition improves collaboration and with.
- I would have to purchase 365 to be able to update my spreadsheets but that it only costs $.99 per month. I didn't like the change that the upgrade would cause but purchased a 12.9 for over $100. Once at home I find that the 365 app cost 6.99/month or $84/yr.
Hopefully I'm not too late with my advice. Hopefully nobody has yet bought Microsoft Office 2019. So why am I recommending that you don't buy it?
Resources to Help Manage Your Costs. Find ways to manage your bill, including averaged monthly payment, custom due date, and more. The My Energy tool is designed to help you better understand your energy use by offering personalized data and resources to reduce your usage and save on monthly bills. Learn more about the many Programs & Rebates that we offer.
Before I explain, if you already understand Microsoft's Office 365 subscription model, then just read the next 3 paragraphs. If you don't know the difference between Office 365 and Office 2019, you'll probably find this entire blog post useful…
Summary
Excel 2019 is a point-in-time snapshot of the features and functionality of Excel. That point-in-time snapshot was taken in March 2018.
- Connect your Microsoft Surface Book 2 to external VGA-compatible devices with this Microsoft USB-C to VGA adapter. The USB-C connection attaches easily for simple setup, and the conveniently sized cord lets you easily position a monitor or video projector close by for sharing images or video.
- If you haven't already done the math, that's $4.5 million per year spent on maintaining spreadsheets for a medium business. Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems may carry a hefty price tag, but they can reduce costs over the long run by making related data available to a large number of people and streamlining accessibility, something spreadsheets just can't do.
- Microsoft Office 2019 Home and Student For Windows PC Ideal for Students and families this package provides the essentials and favourite of Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. It is all you need to be an over achiever! With a new modern look, and time-saving features the 2019 Office Home & Student edition improves collaboration and with.
- I would have to purchase 365 to be able to update my spreadsheets but that it only costs $.99 per month. I didn't like the change that the upgrade would cause but purchased a 12.9 for over $100. Once at home I find that the 365 app cost 6.99/month or $84/yr.
Hopefully I'm not too late with my advice. Hopefully nobody has yet bought Microsoft Office 2019. So why am I recommending that you don't buy it?
Resources to Help Manage Your Costs. Find ways to manage your bill, including averaged monthly payment, custom due date, and more. The My Energy tool is designed to help you better understand your energy use by offering personalized data and resources to reduce your usage and save on monthly bills. Learn more about the many Programs & Rebates that we offer.
Before I explain, if you already understand Microsoft's Office 365 subscription model, then just read the next 3 paragraphs. If you don't know the difference between Office 365 and Office 2019, you'll probably find this entire blog post useful…
Summary
Excel 2019 is a point-in-time snapshot of the features and functionality of Excel. That point-in-time snapshot was taken in March 2018.
Any functionality that Microsoft has added to Excel (and the other applications in Office) since March 2018 will not be available to Office 2019 users. It will only be available to those with an Office 365 subscription.
In other words, when Microsoft released Office 2019 in September 2018, it was already 6 months out of date. Today it is almost A YEAR out of date.
Details
Traditionally Microsoft have released a new version of Office every 3 years, the most recent versions being 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. These versions were either released in those years or late the previous year.
Individuals and organisations can choose to buy the new version or remain on the old version. If you choose to buy the new version you will, of course have to pay (MS Office is not freeware) although if you have a licence for an older version, you are entitled to a cheaper 'upgrade licence'.
Although Microsoft still offer that purchasing model, things changed in 2011 with the introduction of Office 365.
Office 365 is a subscription service from Microsoft. When it comes to the cost and what you get for your money, it get depends on which Office 365 package you buy. There are packages for home users, students and businesses. You can check out the latest prices here
Depending where you buy it from, a single copy of Office 2019 will cost you around $250. However, this is a one-off payment. You won't have to pay again until you decide to upgrade to the next version in say, 2022. That works out at approximately $83 a year and if you choose not to upgrade until Excel 2025 comes out you can cut that cost in half.
For your $250 you get 1 licence which means that you can only install Microsoft Office on a single computer. You do not get access to OneDrive (Microsoft's Cloud-based storage service) nor to Office Online (the browser-based versions of Office).
Compare that to Office 365 Home or Office 365 Business which costs about $100 a year. That figure that won't change unless Microsoft change the price. You can't halve the cost by 'not upgrading' because, just like any other subscription (e.g. Netflix), once you stop paying you lose any entitlement to use it.
Although at face value it's a higher cost per year, you do get more for your money: 6 licences for the latest desktop version of Microsoft Office (PC and Mac), 1TB of file storage on OneDrive, access to Office Online and more.
For me, the biggest benefit of an Office 365 subscription is the regular updates. That is the carrot that Microsoft dangles in front of you to persuade you to purchase a subscription rather than a one-off.
Each month Microsoft release a new 'version' of the Office apps. The versions have numbers in the format of YYMM (e.g 1901 for January 2019). Each time a new version becomes available, you are prompted to download and install it.
Sometimes the new version contains bug fixes, but often it contains really useful and valuable new features. A few recent examples include:
- New functions such as TEXTJOIN and CONCAT
- New data types (stocks and geography)
- New types of charts
- The ability to deselect cells using CTRL
- An updated look and feel to The Ribbon
So to wrap up, when asked whether an Office 365 subscription is worth it, my answer is usually 'Yes' although of course your circumstances may dictate otherwise.
In this article, we take an insightful look into the cost of a single spreadsheet that is used for financial consolidation. Many companies ignore the high cost of maintaining spreadsheets because they have already purchased Excel or another package, and there are not huge license fees. Spreadsheets are great tools for short, small projects, but care should be taken when using them as an extensive resource, as is often done for financial consolidation. Spreadsheets are good choices when you need to organize simple data in a fast and cost-effective manner. It is easy to use Excel to save customer and prospect data when it is a small set to be used by a single person or a small group, but trouble arises when your data grows and more people need access to it. The following is a list of ways that time can be easily wasted when spreadsheets are used to track and consolidate financials:
- Managing and maintaining group-related data.
- Retyping data from spreadsheet to spreadsheet.
- Maintaining references between multiple spreadsheets.
- Consolidating multiple spreadsheets.
- Cross-checking to make sure numbers agree across multiple spreadsheets.
- Maintaining gargantuan spreadsheets.
- Hard-coding data from reports to spreadsheets.
- Rearranging spreadsheets to show new perspectives on the data.
- Restructuring spreadsheet models to reflect changes in the company organization.
- Converting between different proprietary spreadsheet applications.
Look at this simple formula for figuring how much each spreadsheet costs your organization.
How Much Does Excel Cost For Chromebook
What you need to determine is:
- The average amount of time it takes to create, maintain, and correct a single spreadsheet. This will vary for different spreadsheets that are used for different purposes (there are some spreadsheets you work with everyday, while there are others that you only see once in awhile), but we need to come up with an average for the purposes of this article. This, by the way, does not consider a renamed spreadsheet a new sheet. I have been saving the same spreadsheet with a new name every week for the past 3 years, but for our purposes it is still the same spreadsheet (and an expensive one).One thing that can be agreed upon is that the bigger the spreadsheet, the more expensive it is. Employees involved in budgeting and forecasting will tell you that it's possible to look at the same few spreadsheets for an entire year (or over multiple years – next year's budget starts out exactly the same as this year's, you just need to tweak a few values). The point is that people that are heavily involved in creating, maintaining, and correcting spreadsheets generally see fewer spreadsheets per year than others, but the sheets are much bigger and require a substantial amount of time to maintain. There are others who work with many different spreadsheets every day, but these sheets are generally much smaller and require much less time.Let's assume that the average medium-sized business deals with 1,500 accounting spreadsheets per year and employs 30 people (full-time equivalents in this case, or FTEs) to create and maintain them. If we take 2,000 hours as the number of hours worked per year by the average FTE, then we know that (2,000 x 30) = 60,000 hours are spent dealing with spreadsheets. Dividing this by 1,500 spreadsheets, we can calculate the amount of time it takes to create, maintain, and correct a single spreadsheet to be (60,000 / 1,500) = 40 hours.
- The average annual wage of FTEs who create and maintain the spreadsheets. We will use a burdened rate of $75 per hour.
- That's it. Now we multiple 40 hours per spreadsheet by $75 per hour to get $3,000 per spreadsheet (annually).
If you haven't already done the math, that's $4.5 million per year spent on maintaining spreadsheets for a medium business. Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) systems may carry a hefty price tag, but they can reduce costs over the long run by making related data available to a large number of people and streamlining accessibility, something spreadsheets just can't do.
What Does Excel Cost
In addition to the high costs, spreadsheets do not have the data control and governance often embedded in ERP systems. Anyone can change a spreadsheet, and it is often the case that different spreadsheets use different base figures resulting in different end results for different parts of the organization. For SOX and IFRS compliance, it is quite risky to base processes on results derived by a spreadsheet. The drill-down and roll-up from transaction systems is often not available, and many undocumented assumptions are made about how line items in a spreadsheet are calculated. Even accounting basics like making sure that the debits equal the credits for a balancing value are not enforced in a spreadsheet.
The best use of spreadsheets is to satisfy temporary or short-term requirements (such as creating a mapping file to change the chart of accounts). It is not wise or cost-effective for an organization to employ spreadsheets as an integral part of its financial operations. They simply aren't built for it.
eprentise often talks to organizations about changing their chart of accounts or changing the way their operating units or legal entities are set up. Many currently use spreadsheets to perform financial consolidations. Here is one example of a company's monthly consolidation:
In this case, each legal entity was represented across 4 sets of books. In order to consolidate the monthly financials for this company, they created spreadsheets to total the financials for each of the arrows in the diagram. The monthly close process was 20 days. By moving the legal entities into a single set of books, the company reduced their close cycle to 3 days, got more accurate data, eliminated thousands of spreadsheets, and reduced costs.
See how eprentise can help you eliminate spreadsheets or change the chart of accounts to better reflect how you want to track your business by clicking through to the FlexField page.
