How to Escape from Email and Spreadsheets to Be More Productive

Data is the lifeblood of business. Getting it, sharing it, using it.

Have you ever tried to share data with your team through a spreadsheet?

Ask your sales team for monthly sales projections for the rest of the year for your annual report. You get a different spreadsheet from each channel – email, web, phone and social media. Now you have to add all that data together and produce one of those charts that looks like it was created from a spreadsheet (which it was) so you can present it to your executive team. If your sales team revises projections, you have to update the spreadsheet manually.

Even worse, you have to collect the information by email, and then share it by email – or by printing it out. Either way, the process is inefficient, time-consuming, and (in the case of printing paper) expensive.

Everyone who’s done it has wished the spreadsheet would spring to life and become universally available – like a website. 

Transform Your Spreadsheets into Online Collaborative Applications

Well, the time has come. Today you can upload your spreadsheet and convert it into a robust web-based application with Kintone. For a small business especially, there are several benefits:

• Get started fast: Upload your spreadsheet and convert it. It takes literally seconds.
• Share the Same Data: Everyone who has access to the application sees the same information, just like everyone who visits a website sees the same information. No email attachments, no passing out hardcopies.
• Access from anywhere: Opening a spreadsheet on most mobile devices is cumbersome at best, but you can access your Kintone workspace through a browser or ass an application, not as an email attachment.
• Go paperless: It doesn’t make the headlines, but paper is a huge expense for many companies. Transform your spreadsheets into applications, and never print spreadsheets again.
• Easy to update: Add a row, add a column, add users, change data. It’s all simple drag-and-drop.
• Real-time charts and graphs: As your data updates, the charts and graphs reflecting your data change too without manually updating. Your data is easier to digest, share and understand.
• Workflow: it’s easy to add business process and workflow to track status of each sales lead, approve timesheet, etc.

The Kintone Difference

Business success or failure is often determined in the details. That being said, let’s see what makes Kintone different:

• Workspace: A stand-alone application is great, but Kintone gives you a dedicated workspace that you can share with your team. Your applications sit in your workspace, creating a collaborative environment for your participants, so you and your team can communicate in a live chat board in context with your application so your team doesn’t have to toggle programs.
• External collaboration: Go beyond your team and share your workspaces with vendors, partners, anyone outside your company. Approve timesheets, review designs and manage your call center through your applications without ever leaving your workspace.
• Workflows: Sharing is one thing. With Kintone you can assign workflows in minutes, assigning potential actions and approvers at each step to maintain control of your processes.
  
  

Make Collaboration Easy

To convert your spreadsheet into an app you don’t have to select data or configure anything. Just add a new app in your workspace, select Create from Excel or CSV, and import a spreadsheet. Done!

Then in Settings, you can add a real-time graph or chart with a click, making your data more digestible. You can also use powerful drag-and-drop tools to create processes and workflows, add fields, and much more. Because it’s an online app, your collaborators have instant access to it – always the latest version.

You also benefit from automatic integration with other business systems. When you use Kintone, you get a marketplace of more than two dozen business applications that come pre-integrated and ready to share with other members of your workspace. Do all your work in the cloud with airtight security and no unscheduled downtime ever.

Conclusion

Spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel in particular, have been around for a long time because they are great tools. But they were created to solve the digital problems of a 20th century world, and they still do. Today we need them to do more – connect to other people, reflect real-time data, show the same data to all users, be easy to use. Kintone products and services do all those things and more.

Learn more about the benefits of taking your spreadsheets to the cloud to increase business productivity. Then come visit us and take a free trial.