Why Microsoft Excel is not a suitable seminar management tool?

Excel is a widely used spreadsheet program that is known for its user-friendly interface and powerful data analysis capabilities. Many users also take advantage of its ability to manage and manipulate data. However, despite its popularity and ease of use, Excel is not always the best tool for managing data in a business context. In fact, relying too heavily on Excel can lead to significant challenges and complications.

In this blog post, we will explore the challenges of using Excel for data management through the example of a seminar administration.

In this scenario, the company wants to offer seminars for both internal and external employees. The person in charge decides to use Excel, a widely known and easily accessible software to manage the process. To incorporate external participants, the IT department provides a customer export from the merchandise management system, which is imported into Excel. The data is organized into tables, with an intermediate table created to manage seminar participants for a specific date. The S-reference function in Excel is used to quickly combine the data. Finally, a participant certificate is created to provide attendees with proof of attendance.

Initially, using Excel to manage seminars with up to 1000 participants across 80 events per year was a suitable solution. However, as the company expanded and organized more seminars, the need for more advanced seminar management tools increased. What was once a helpful solution became a critical application for the business to manage seminars effectively.

Here are some reasons why Excel is no longer the best seminar management tool:

1. Lack of transparency: With an increasing number of tables and documents spread across different folders, it becomes difficult to keep track of everything.
2. Time-consuming: Excel can become a time-eater over time as documents such as certificates, invoices, registration confirmations, and feedback forms are managed in different locations on the file system, requiring additional time for searching.
3. Poor collaboration: Excel is not designed for real-time collaboration between multiple users.
4. Limited automation: Excel is not well suited for real-time multi-user collaboration, which can be problematic when managing seminars with many participants.
5. Limited scalability: Excel can become slow and unreliable with large amounts of data, and is not well suited for managing data on a large scale.
6. Limited access control: Excel provides limited control over who can access and edit data.
7. Poor data integrity: Excel lacks features for data checking, automatic backups, and monitoring changes, which can lead to data integrity issues.

As the number of seminars and participants grows, Excel proves to be insufficient for managing all of the necessary tasks. Seminar managers end up using a variety of software tools for different aspects of seminar administration, leading to inefficiencies and making daily work more difficult. The process of seamlessly connecting Excel to an online portal becomes complicated, resulting in issues such as remaining places not being displayed, and the customer experience during booking suffering due to the time-consuming nature of the process.

Additionally, the lack of a digital participant and trainer portal leads to information being exchanged through email or mail, further adding to the workload. As a result, seminar managers end up working overtime and dividing tasks among employees, as one person can no longer manage the entire process.

This leads to a time-consuming and unscalable seminar administration process.

Conclusion

If you're interested in improving your company's efficiency, increasing sales, and providing a better customer experience for seminar bookings, consider exploring simplyOrg. This web-based, all-in-one seminar management tool in the cloud can save you a significant amount of time and money, while also eliminating scalability concerns. By taking advantage of a free online demo, you can gain a better understanding of how simplyOrg can optimize your seminar management and potentially save up to 70% of your working time.