MICROSOFT EXCEL IN

THE CLOUD : HOW TO

GET MORE FROM A

SUPER SOLUT ION

www.rightnetworks.com

If you’re a small business, Microsoft Excel likely plays a very prominent role in your

day to day operations. The tried and true spreadsheet solution has been a mainstay in accounting

(to name just one field) for more than 30 years. In fact, some view Excel as the tool that doomed

the ledger, a system that has been in place since perhaps purveyors were chipping accounts receivable

 entries into stone tablets.

And in Excel’s defense, it isn’t just for small businesses. Users have relied on Microsoft Excel for everything from

timelines to project management planning to score and voting tabulations. How could we ask anything more of a

program that has given us so much? It turns out that pairing Excel with QuickBooks Desktop in the cloud can turn

the extraordinary application into a superpower.

Excel and QuickBooks Desktop are a natural pair. You likely use Excel for budgeting, preparing certain types of

financial statements, modeling, forecasting, planning activities, and exporting reports from QuickBooks Desktop.

Excel loves to pull in data. Sales data, banking data, invoices – all kinds of information that will support your

accounting activities.

If you’re running Excel on your local computer, however, you’re missing a critical connection between the two

programs. For example, let’s say a small business would like to do some financial forecasting for one of its clients.

It’s hard to beat Excel’s abilities to make comparisons and anticipate future scenarios without permanently altering

the data in QuickBooks Desktop. The details of a Balance Sheet can’t be copied out of QuickBooks Desktop and

pasted into Excel. That report, and others like it, was designed to be exported.

Without a cloud-enabled Excel, the only option is to export the details to a CSV (comma separated value) file. From

here, the result is a plain-text “spreadsheet” where rows of text are separated columns delineated by commas. The

user can then open the file in Excel to automatically convert it to a spreadsheet, but since it’s a plain text file being

opened, only the rows and columns are maintained, and none of the formatting.

With a cloud-enabled Excel paired with a cloud-enabled QuickBooks Desktop, just exporting the data from

QuickBooks Desktop into a new Excel workbook will retain all the formatting. More importantly, you’ll save time

since there will be no need to export, and then import the same information.

Small businesses also likely have more than one individual that will need to access and edit the same financial data.

In that scenario, if one individual transfers data into Excel on their local machine, that person is now in possession

of the new “working file.” That means that others are looking at incorrect and outdated information. Keeping your

Excel file in the cloud means that sharing reports and spreadsheets among different users becomes seamless and

that everyone is referencing the same, up to date, information.