Spreadsheets take on the Fancy Food Show

Recently, Excel Rain Man hit the aisles of the Javits Center in NYC for the Fancy Food Show, the largest specialty food trade event in North America.

Why, would an Excel outsourcing and consulting company visit a trade event featuring the yummiest companies on earth? Was it all a ploy to garner troves of delicious goodies?

No my friends (although plenty of treats made their way home with me)… Excel Rain Man visited the Fancy Food Show because many of our clients are in the food industry!

I tell you this because from time to time, companies may not realize how they could use Excel to make their lives easier, improve reporting, maintain stock lists, manage finances and databases etc.

So in celebration of our delectable data solutions for the food industry, we asked various clients and prospects at the Fancy Food Show to share some of their favorite uses of Excel in their daily lives.

The responses ranged from enthusiastic…

“You can do everything in Excel. How does a business exist without Excel?”
“I freak out over PivotTables… that’s my jam!”
“I just love Macros.”

To the hilarious…

“This is the dorkiest question I have ever been asked… OK, definitely Control F as I like to easily find what I am looking for.”
“Messin’ with PivotTables. Make sure there’s no ‘g’… it’s ‘messin’”
“Mad respect when someone sends over a sweet spreadsheet.”

Overall, these companies favorite ways to use spreadsheets were similar to the rest of us data dorks…

Favorite Functions: VLOOKUPs, PivotTables, slicers, AutoSum, copy/paste formula
Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts: Control F, F9 to refresh
Favorite Uses:
- Analytics: Allows them to market business better, make sense of lots of data, understand the ins and outs of their business and manage P&Ls
- Pricing: Keeping track of Ingredients and Recipes for Pricing… cross linking workbooks to updating pricing for ingredients flows through to everything else
- Staying organized: Ability to stay on top of things as the business grows, logging and tracking info on to inventory, purchase orders, social media etc.

Finally, while all of the companies at the Fancy Food Show provide the world with amazing goodies, a few of our favorites, based on a combined metric of taste and spreadsheet admiration include: