I deal a lot with niche business solutions. In my experience, too many managers and staff think that Excel is the Swiss Army Knife of data management. Can't rea

I deal a lot with niche business solutions. In my experience, too many managers and staff think that Excel is the Swiss Army Knife of data management. Can't really blame them, it is typically the only app they know. An MS promotes Office as a "universal" solution for SMEs. Whilst I can't eliminate the pain, I found two strategies that work well: 1. As far as possible, let them develop spreadsheets and treat them as prototypes. Then take control of the critical ones and polish them so that they work correctly (protect fields, audit calculations, write macros, etc). 2. Instead of importing data from Excel, I export from Excel into a database (designed as a receiver for that data). Then I run a collection of scripts on the database to clean up the data and only then import that cleaned up data into the production database(s).