Abraham Maslow, creator of the most famous pyramid outside of Egypt, once said that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This is known as the law of the instrument, and it refers to the human tendency to over-rely on a familiar tool, specifically in cases where it is not appropriate.
In the six years that I’ve been teaching spreadsheet courses and doing spreadsheet contract work, this phenomenon has reared its head more than a few times. In 2025 alone, I had four separate Zoom meetings where potential clients showed me the One Spreadsheet to Rule Them All that had their business in a mighty chokehold.
You know what sheet I’m talking about. It has more tabs than even the ultra-wide, ultra-productive screen can handle, mostly with vague names that don’t clearly differentiate their uses; there are far too many colours being used, and they are far too bright; mismatched fonts and formatting abound due to someone copy-pasting from a website or email without doing paste-as-values; it is littered with eyesores such as #VALUE!, #REF!, and #N/A; and the entire thing is held together by a twelve-line formula written by a former employee who is probably uncontactable because he’s enjoying the cool breeze of a wheat farm in Montana.
So where did it all go wrong?
The way it often happens is that one of the early people in the business, usually a founder or partner, starts putting things into a spreadsheet. This is a good thing, because Post-It notes definitely don’t cut it. With only a handful of columns and rows to start with, things appear manageable and organised, and it feels good. As the business starts to grow, however, a column gets added here, a tab there, and within a few weeks the labyrinth is in full swing.
For a while, it’s more of an inconvenience than an actual problem. New employees learn the sheet, and as it existed before their employment began, they often regard it with a certain measure of respect. They add more rows as new things happen, try not to break things, and the wheels keep turning. More months go by, and now there are a handful of people accessing the sheet on a daily basis, each having carved out their own corner that they love best.
But bit by bit, as new features get baked in with more tabs, dropdown menus, and lookup formulas, the balance of power shifts, and before long the deathgrip of the One Spreadsheet tightens. It’s at this point that I get an email or WhatsApp message wanting to jump on that Zoom call.
It’s hard to point the finger at any single action that brought the spreadsheet to this undesirable place. No calamitous mistake was made. Rather, the culprit is exponential decay, the evil twin of compound interest. Let’s say your spreadsheet begins at being 100% “Good”. After that, if you do something 95% properly, your spreadsheet is now 95% Good. Do another thing 95% properly and now your spreadsheet is 90.25% Good. After only ten such occurrences (0.95^10), your spreadsheet stands at a measly 60%. And this is by doing things that were 95% correct at each turn. With several employees handling the sheet on a daily basis, things can quickly spiral out of control. Making a decision that’s 95% correct seems pretty good at any single juncture, but string together several 95% decisions, and soon you’re in over your head. Go have some fun and see how fast things decrease when you do 0.95^11, 0.95^12, and so on. (If you’ve been using the word “exponential” incorrectly your whole life, you’re welcome.)
Of course, there is no such quantifiable measure of a spreadsheet’s Goodness, but the lesson here is that spreadsheets are often the second best tool for the job. It’s much easier to open a new sheet than sign up for a new software. Spreadsheet adoption, too, is far simpler than software adoption. You share edit or view access with whoever needs, and away you go. No admin panel buried in the My Account section of a menu. And best of all, it comes free bundled with your Google or Microsoft account.
So all of this is understandable. But it is not sustainable.
Guess how much in fees I’ve charged from the clients to which I referred earlier? If you guessed more than zero, you’re wrong. You may think it’s bad business acumen to turn away projects that don’t make sense, but that’s a discussion for a different article. After looking over the sheets in as much detail as 15-30 minutes can give me, I’ve told the clients similar things. You really need a proper CRM; I have a friend who can help get you set up. You probably shouldn’t do that Apps Script because it’s liable to break and ChatGPT won’t be able to save you. You can’t do two-way syncing between a master and child spreadsheet in a way that resembles even a shadow of user-friendliness. Sure, I’d love to build this thing you’re asking for, but you’d be hamstringing your business even further and I don’t advise that.
The trouble is, by the time the spreadsheet is knocking against the ceiling of possibility and the client is coming to me for help, they often feel that it is insurmountable to shift things over to a new software. It would take a substantial interruption of operations or an investment of one person’s time and effort more than they can squeeze in order to get it done. Most small businesses don’t have a staff member — even someone in operations — dedicated to organising systems or managing migrations. There’s not enough work to justify a full-time salary. And contracting a consultant or software expert can be costly. I fully sympathise with the situation the businesses are in, and in all likelihood the One Spreadsheet will continue to Rule Them All.
For businesses that are not yet in this predicament but can see some of the symptoms emerging, my advice is to think critically about whether a spreadsheet is really the right tool for that next feature you want to add. Even half an hour of considered research into the different softwares available will get you further than most people. Watch a couple YouTube tutorials and see if you like the user interface. Check the pricing page and see if you can fit it into your budget. The more you do this, the more you will start to get a feel for the software landscape, and the next time you think to add something to the spreadsheet, you might get a healthy little alarm bell in your head that says “maybe it’s time”.
If you want your spreadsheet to send you an email each time a status column dropdown menu contains a certain value, it might be time to go. If you’ve Googled around a bit for a solution to a problem and the only answer is Apps Script and you’ve never coded in your life, it’s probably time to go. If you start a new tab and the automatic name is Sheet53, it’s definitely time to go.
Expand your toolkit beyond the hammer and reap the rewards of well-structured business systems that can last long into the future.