Is It Time to Ditch Excel for Monitoring & Evaluation?

If you’re using Excel for your project’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E), you’re not alone.

Excel is a fantastic tool for organizing data, running calculations, and even building dashboards. It offers the flexibility needed for small and growing organizations to manage M&E processes efficiently. With the introduction of online features and AI-driven insights, Excel has become even more powerful for some organizations.

But, as your project complexity grows, you may start encountering certain challenges that Excel isn’t always best suited to handle. Here’s a breakdown of how you can decide if it’s time to stick with Excel or consider other options.

The Strengths of Excel in M&E

Excel provides project teams with a versatile platform that works well for:

• Data Collection: You can build simple, customizable data collection templates for team use.
• Data Organization: Excel’s grid system makes it easy to organize, filter, and sort data.
• Basic Analysis: With the right formulas, Excel can quickly generate calculations and simple reports.
• Dashboard Creation: With the addition of pivot tables and graphs, Excel lets you visualize data in real-time.

For smaller projects or when teams have strong Excel skills, it remains a solid choice. However, as your needs grow, some challenges may arise.

Common Challenges of Using Excel for M&E

While Excel can be great for handling straightforward tasks, it comes with some challenges that may start to hinder your M&E work as projects grow more complex:

• Version Control: Multiple team members editing Excel sheets can lead to confusion over which file is the latest. Without a clear “source of truth,” errors can creep into your data.
• Data Integrity: As you start working with more complex formulas or AI-driven features, it can become hard to know whether your data and calculations are accurate. Small mistakes in formulas can lead to misleading results.
• Scalability: When linking several Excel sheets or workbooks together, you may spend more time troubleshooting broken links or formulas than actually analyzing your data.
• Collaboration Issues: Despite recent improvements, Excel’s collaboration features can be clunky. Multiple people working on a single sheet can lead to overwrites, lost work, or unintentional mistakes.

If these sound familiar, you’re not alone. Many organizations that rely on Excel for M&E find themselves hitting these pain points as their projects grow or become more complex.

Tips to Improve Your Excel Use for M&E

If you’re not ready to move away from Excel yet, there are ways to improve how you use it for M&E:

1. Set Clear Version Control: Use clear file-naming conventions and store your files in a central, cloud-based platform like OneDrive or SharePoint. This helps ensure everyone works from the same version.
2. Document Your Formulas: Keep a document explaining any complex formulas or calculations. This helps your team (and future you) understand how data is being processed.
3. Audit Your Data Regularly: Set a routine for checking data accuracy and verifying that formulas and links between sheets are functioning correctly.
4. Use Excel’s Collaboration Tools: Make sure your team is familiar with Excel’s online version and use real-time editing features to reduce versioning issues.
5. Limit Linked Workbooks: Try to keep related data within a single workbook instead of linking multiple files. This can save you headaches down the road.

When It Might Be Time to Consider Alternatives

While you can optimize Excel for M&E, at some point, you may find that the challenges of managing large or complex projects outweigh the benefits of using a spreadsheet tool. This is where dedicated M&E platforms like Kinaki can make a difference.

Kinaki is designed specifically for monitoring and evaluation, giving project teams a reliable, scalable platform for managing data. Here’s what life with Kinaki looks like:

• One Source of Truth: With Kinaki, your data is centralized and always up-to-date. No more version confusion or manual syncing between different spreadsheets.
• Team Collaboration Made Easy: Collaborate with your team members in Kinaki by giving them the right access to the right projects. Harmonize the labeling of data sets and calculate indicators consistently over time.
• Faster Data Collection and Reporting: Kinaki automates much of the data processing, allowing you to generate reports in just a few clicks—no pivot tables or manual calculations needed.
• Bigger Picture Insights: For organizations managing multiple projects, Kinaki allows you measure project-wide or portfolio-wide KPIs, helping you make data-driven decisions faster.

Why Not Try Both?

You don’t have to make a hard choice between Excel and Kinaki. In fact, you can bring your Excel files into Kinaki to continue using what works for you while taking advantage of the advanced features Kinaki offers. This way, you get the best of both worlds—Excel’s flexibility and Kinaki’s power for streamlining M&E processes.

Conclusion: Should You Ditch Excel?

Excel is and will always be an incredibly useful tool for M&E, especially for small projects. However, if your organization is finding it harder to manage larger or more complex projects, it may be time to experiment with something built specifically for monitoring and evaluation. You don’t have to give up Excel entirely, but exploring new approaches like Kinaki can help you stay organized, improve collaboration, and save time on reporting.