Spreadsheets are software. Geeks know software. So geeks understand spreadsheets. Apparently.

Although the Garys in sales, the Jemimas in marketing and the Vickys in HR like to lump us spreadsheets jockeys in with the Clives in IT, I’ve never seen it myself.

True, we both spend more hours a day than is possibly healthy staring at a computer screen – although, who doesn’t these days?

But here in finance, we do actually have clothes in our wardrobe other than baggy T-shirts with insider-ish jokes on them – such as “my other computer is your Windows box”. Ha-bloody-ha. IT geeks we are not.

But just lately, the geeks have started to move in on finance’s turf. It all started when Bill Gates pitched up at the British Library in January to announce that a rare Leonardo da Vinci manuscript has been digitised on Windows Vista – that makes at least one old document compatible with the new operating system, I suppose.

The next day I was joined in the canteen by one of the alpha-Clives muttering about the need for collaboration between our departments. Even though I ignored them it was a real puzzler: why should those two events correlate? Soon enough, FD revealed the truth.

IT director had returned from a conference bearing a white paper from Microsoft entitled Spreadsheet Compliance in Microsoft Office 2007.

Because he knows finance is the only department that “gets” spreadsheets, he forwarded it to FD who simply added the instruction “read and prepare a one-page executive summary for me” and hit “Fwd: Barry”.

I was furious – IT getting ideas about how we should be using spreadsheets? It’s not like we tell them how to configure the port buffer on the IP stack, is it?

The report was more than 20 pages so I doubted whether any of the Clives, who are mostly ADD, could have read the lot in one sitting anyway. I opened the PDF and immersed myself in Bill Gates’ finest hour: the power of the spreadsheet within today’s corporation.

No reasonable man could disagree with the general thrust of the document – that nothing of any sustainable good happens in the world of commerce, financial services or the public sector unless it has appeared in a spreadsheet.

Dodgy Iraq dossier? Word, obviously. Enron’s special purpose vehicles? All the numbers in a bloated PowerPoint file suitable for some Jeremy at an investment bank to digest before lunch.

The paper acknowledged that “spreadsheets are used to support critical business processes” and therefore there is an urgent need for “a spreadsheet compliance framework”. Hear, hear.

But then the paper went off-track. One paragraph entitled Getting IT and business users on the same page summed up where Bill and his friends had badly mislaid the plot.

I quote: “To be successful, a compliance strategy must be driven by the needs of the business and its users. This problem can be addressed from the start by engaging both IT staff and individual users. Because IT staff have knowledge of spreadsheet functionality, (my emphasis) getting them involved early can help reduce duplication of work and increase the robustness of the solution.”

You what? The idea that IT staff know what a spreadsheet actually does is a bit like saying Dave from Dave’s Motors knows how a car works, so he’ll be signing a three-year deal for the second seat at McLaren. They might know how it works but not what it does.

To test this theory I thought of asking FD for a mentor from the IT department so that we can collaborate on defining the appropriate spreadsheet controls.

As a five-minute warm-up we could discuss conditional formatting, subtotals and auto filters in such wild and wacky spreadsheets such as the bank rec and the business unit rolling budget.

Of course, I didn’t suggest the mentoring idea. That might kick off committees, meetings and new bullet-points for my appraisal forms.

So my one-page summary centred on the fact that Gates’ major contribution to the sum of human events was the desktop application which means that us productive finance workers are free from the tyranny of having to rely on the day-to-day support of the IT department.

I did suggest some smart ideas for improving spreadsheet compliance, but I think we’ll be presenting the Clives in IT with a fait accompli on that score. FD’s already worried enough about IT director making it to the board, so I’m pretty sure he’ll see it my way.

Tags: it, microsoft, spreadsheets, bill gates,

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