A leading provider of Event Management Software conducted a survey in which he asked about preferred tool for managing and planning their events to UK based event managers. The mostly tool was event management software with 67% of votes. Spreadsheets are used for managing events. They can Create, manage lists, track budgets and monitor resources with the help of spreadsheets. The cost of spreadsheets is low. Most of them are accepted document format. They cannot decide to use spreadsheets as their main event management software tool. Because there are very much limitations of spreadsheets as compared to Event management software. Limitations are:
Poor efficiency: It is not an effective method to managing events. they have to use and hold many different spreadsheets, all with dozens of tabs, a huge amount of data. It will be difficult for others to manage all the data within spreadsheets and it will take more time.
Data can be lost: When the data is stored in hard drive of computer, there is a risk of lost all the data if some happens to that computer or laptop. In spreadsheets all the events or records are saved on a regular basis, so there is a high risk that data and work will be lost.
Updating issue: There are multiple event managers for many events. They all are used same spreadsheets to manage their events and data. When they are going to update their spreadsheets without informing the others, there will be creating problems to others. When they work on a copy of the master spreadsheet, it will be out of date. They cannot use same spreadsheet at same time. Because only one spreadsheet copy can be opened for editing, others can only read it.
Hard to create reports to measure success: The ability of Event management software is to analyze event. With help of Event management software, event managers can analyze the performance of event which makes it successful. But it is difficult task by the use of spreadsheets. On spreadsheets, we can create charts and graphs easily but the sorting of data can be complicated and it can take more time as compare to Event management software. The performance of event is dismissed by the use of spreadsheets.
Author is an executive with the Aprimo. More information on //www.aprimo.com/>Event Management Software is available on their website.
