If you’re like most of the people in this business, you rely on spreadsheets for just about everything you do. In fact, I’d wager that most of you reading this column haven’t a clue as to how many spreadsheets are in use in your organisation. (Count the number of people in your organisation who would tend to be spreadsheet creators and users. Now multiply that number by the average number of spreadsheets most of those professionals have built and use on a regular basis. That’s a lot of spreadsheets.) In fact, the people in your organisation most likely are using hundreds — if not thousands — of different spreadsheets to accomplish various analytical and reporting tasks.

Now, consider how all that data makes its way into all those spreadsheets. Most likely, the user either manually types the data into the spreadsheet or builds a field map and downloads the data into the spreadsheet from one of your legacy systems. All of this assumes, of course, that the data in th