The Pros and Cons of Using Excel for Strategic Planning

When I first started working in strategic planning, Excel and PowerPoint were the gold standard. Nearly every organization relied on these tools to map out their goals, track progress, and present insights to leadership teams. “Back in my day,” the tools were revolutionary, offering flexibility and accessibility that served us well for decades. Today, these budget-friendly tools still suffice, but they’ve become dated for modern strategic planning.

Organizations now deal with more complex data, distributed teams, and the need to collaborate in real time. Entering data into Excel by hand, building complex formulas, and then moving the information to PowerPoint for presentations takes a lot of time (and money). Worse, it’s prone to errors and inconsistencies. Excel and PowerPoint struggle to keep up.

The old tried-and-true may work for you, but relying solely on Excel for strategic planning may be holding your organization back. Below is my list of pros and cons, and why many organizations are rethinking this approach.

Pros of Using Excel for Strategic Planning

1. ‍Accessibility: Excel is everywhere in business. Most professionals already know their way around it, so teams can start using it for strategic planning quickly.
2. Data Management Capabilities: Excel lets you build custom templates, apply complex formulas, and design all kinds of charts and graphs. That flexibility lets you tailor analysis and reporting to your organization’s needs.
3. Cost-Effectiveness: Excel often comes with standard office software, so organizations, especially smaller ones, can manage strategic planning without paying for more software.

Familiar is not the same as simple, though. The City of St. Albert, Alberta, collected its plan updates through a mix of emails and Excel sheets, then compiled them into a Word document for reporting. The report had to be rebuilt every quarter, and the process demanded a high level of technical Excel knowledge from the team. After the move to ClearPoint, report creation dropped from an estimated 100 hours to just 25. The city puts the cut at about 75% of its overall time for the process.

Cons of Using Excel for Strategic Planning

1. ‍Manual Data Entry and Error-Prone Processes: Strategic planning in Excel often means a lot of manual data entry, which leads to errors and inconsistencies. The lack of automation increases the risk of inaccuracies in strategic reports.
2. Collaboration Challenges: Sharing Excel files across a team creates multiple versions, and it gets hard to tell which data is current. That complicates collaboration and can lead to misaligned strategies.
3. Scalability Limitations: As organizations grow, the complexity and volume of data can overwhelm Excel. Large datasets and advanced analytics become cumbersome, and strategic planning suffers.
4. Security Concerns: Excel lacks advanced security features, which leaves sensitive strategic information open to unauthorized access.

These problems feed each other. DC Thomson Media, one of the UK’s leading content creators, ran its strategy from Excel spreadsheets containing up to 200 rows of data. Each month, two team members spent 4 days on preparation. PowerPoint presentations were created separately for board meetings, and action items were tracked in disconnected Excel documents. The team also fought version control issues and formula errors. After the move to ClearPoint, report preparation went from 4 days to just 8 hours per month, a 75% reduction in board meeting preparation time.

Our breakdown of the hidden costs of Excel reporting adds the people cost. We’ve found that an average report will see eight people before it’s complete. The labor costs of manual reporting add up fast once you break them down.

Excel is familiar and flexible for some parts of a strategic plan, but its limits in others can slow strategy execution. Organizations that want a better planning process might consider dedicated strategic planning software that addresses these problems and offers more features. Platforms like ClearPoint Strategy offer an integrated approach to strategic planning, combining artificial intelligence (AI), real-time collaboration, and advanced analytics to simplify the planning process. With tools like these, organizations can overcome the cons of Excel and get better strategic results.

If you do move, don’t copy the spreadsheet across as it is. Our guide to moving a strategic plan off spreadsheets starts with an audit: retire goals that never left “Not Started” and give every measure an active owner before you import anything. Then rebuild the plan in the platform’s own structure, because copying the spreadsheet wholesale just reproduces its problems. Finally, retire the spreadsheet publicly on a named date. As long as it lives, it competes with the new system as the authoritative source.

The City of St. Cloud, Florida, shows why the rebuild matters. For three years its plan lived in spreadsheets upon spreadsheets. When the city overhauled its planning process in 2021, the old plan had overall goals but no objectives. Strategic Initiatives Administrator Abismael Abreu added objectives and KPIs, so the city could see where it was succeeding and where it was slacking. In ClearPoint, every department now feeds one system where the plan’s objectives link to departmental initiatives.

Compare ClearPoint to the Status Quo

Excel is a fine starting point for many strategy professionals, but specialized software makes it much easier to manage and execute your plans. How good your strategic plan is matters less than the results you turn it into. See the pros of specialized strategy software for yourself.

See how ClearPoint would run your plan — book a demo