Why Excel is no longer enough to manage a strategic plan

For years, Excel has been the go-to tool for managing strategic plans. Accessible and versatile, everyone knows how to use it. However, when it comes time to turn a vision into concrete actions, Excel’s limits quickly become apparent: multiplying spreadsheets, difficulty collaborating, and tedious data updates.

In this article, we’ll explore why Excel is no longer suited for modern strategic tracking and which alternatives can help you better execute your plans.

The limits of Excel for strategic tracking

A static approach

Excel is great for calculations, but it wasn’t designed to manage living processes like a strategic plan. Modifying the structure, adding new objectives, or tracking several plans in parallel quickly becomes a headache.

Lack of collaboration

In most organizations, strategic tracking involves multiple stakeholders: management, department heads, field teams, and sometimes even external partners. Yet Excel remains a static file. Email exchanges and multiple versions lead to lost time and lost information.

Challenging accountability

Preparing a report from Excel means extracting, copying, formatting… and repeating the process every quarter. Tables quickly become outdated, and transparency with stakeholders is compromised.

What alternatives enable more effective tracking?

Specialized tools

Today, several platforms specialize in strategic tracking: Cascade, Perdoo, Profit.co, AchieveIt, WorkBoard, and even Monday for project management. Each offers a more dynamic approach than Excel, with indicators, dashboard views, and collaboration features.

The case of Planivore

Some platforms go further by adapting to the realities of complex organizations. For example, Planivore allows you to structure a strategic plan based on the vocabulary and levels of your organization (municipalities, colleges, non-profits, professional orders, ministries, etc.).

Some of its distinctive strengths include:

• Multilingual: ideal for organizations that need to produce reports and dashboards in multiple languages depending on their audiences.
• Integrated AI: tools to simplify the work (text rewriting, summary generation, automatic translation), but also suggestions for actions and indicators to help build your strategic and action plans.
• Flexibility: the ability to track an overall strategic plan, while allowing each department or service to develop its own action plan — linked to broader strategies, or managed autonomously as needed.

A concrete example

Imagine an organization with several departments (e.g., finance, human resources, sustainable development). Each has its own action plan, but all must also contribute to the overall strategic plan.

• In Excel, this means multiplying files and then manually consolidating the information to get an overview.
• With a collaborative tool like Planivore, each department updates its actions in its own space while linking its objectives to strategic directions. Senior management can get a real-time global view, while each team retains autonomy over its priorities.

Conclusion

Excel has long served organizations well, but today it shows its limits when it comes to strategic planning. Collaborative tracking, transparency, and flexibility require tools designed for this purpose.

If you’d like to explore an alternative, you can try Planivore for free and discover how a collaborative dashboard can transform your governance practices.