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A current survey conducted by a leading provider of event safes asked UK based event managers what was their preferred tool for managing and planning their events. The commonest tool undoubtedly was event store with 67% in the votes. Coming second and third were spreadsheets and ‘other’ respectively.

Spreadsheets certainly are a proven strategy for managing events – they can track budgets, monitor resources and can be an easy way of developing and managing lists. The advantage of spreadsheets as a possible event management tool may be the low priced linked to them. Nearly all event managers have accessibility to spreadsheets plus they are a widely accepted document format.

However, you can find a lot of drawbacks if event managers decide on spreadsheets as his or her main event management tool. Common issues include:

Poor efficiency: Using spreadsheets isn’t a very effective approach to managing all of the areas of an event. It is likely that event managers will probably be using a variety of spreadsheets, all with many tabs, holding so much data. Managing all this data within spreadsheets could be confusing with an outsider, and time consuming for many users.

Lost data: Spreadsheets are merely as safe as the server/system they sit on. If they are kept on your personal computer hard drive, there is a risk that all the data will be lost however goes wrong with that laptop or computer. Spreadsheets will also be susceptible to freezing/stalling and unless the big event manager is acquainted with conserving consistently, you will find there’s high-risk that data and work will be lost.

Trouble keeping data up-to-date: Many events have multiple event managers, all using the same spreadsheets to organise and plan various areas. Problems arise when managers update spreadsheets without informing the opposite event mangers that this spreadsheet has changed. If event managers require a copy in the master spreadsheet and focus on that, the actual soon becomes out of date. There are also issues when several event manger must connect to the spreadsheet as well. Merely one editable copy could be opened, causing the others to be ‘read only’ – removing the ability to make updates.

Hard to create reports to determine success: A key part of event management could be the capability to analyse event success. It is essential to achieve the capability to understand what makes a particular event successful and what must be measured so that you can analyse event performance. Using spreadsheets makes video trial. Although creating graphs and charts could be easy on spreadsheets, the amalgamation and sorting with the data is an extremely complicated and time consuming task. It is quite often necessity that after using spreadsheets, the game of measuring event performance is forgotten or dismissed.

Not enough management information: Much like the difficulty in creating reports to analyse performance, gleam lack of management information overall. For companies organising many events per year you need to have the ability to have a very clear picture of such events as a whole; understanding delegate numbers, budgets and other KPI’s across all events can help shape event strategy down the road.

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