7 Reasons Why Excel Falls Short for Communications Tracking
It’s 2026, and while nostalgia for the 2010s is trending, your communications workflow shouldn’t be stuck in the past.
Starting with a spreadsheet is a rite of passage for every comms team. It’s accessible, searchable and familiar. But as your media hits grow, your team expands, and your issues management and media efforts become more complex, that “flexible” spreadsheet quickly becomes a liability.
If you’re still copy-pasting links into a grid, here are 7 reasons why tracking your work in Excel is holding your team back.
1. Spreadsheets Don’t Scale Well
Spreadsheets are great for a team of one. But as your team grows, so does your data. What starts as one simple sheet inevitably turns into 12 monthly tabs, five dashboard sheets and a dozen pivot tables. Before you know it, you aren’t managing communications; you’re managing a digital labyrinth.
2. Formulas Break Easily
An Excel sheet shared by a large squad is easier to break than an egg. All it takes is one teammate accidentally deleting a cell or “cleaning up” a column to trigger a cascade of #REF! errors. When your reporting depends on a fragile web of linked cells, one wrong keystroke can wipe out a month of data.
3. Difficulty Managing Permissions
Comms work is a mix of public wins and highly sensitive internal issues. Delineating between the two in Excel is a nightmare. You’re often forced to choose between “everyone sees everything” or managing a mess of password-protected files and SharePoint workarounds. Real tools offer granular permissions—Excel offers a padlock on a glass door.
4. It’s Generic, Not Specialized
The beauty of Excel is that it can be anything. The curse is that you have to build it yourself. Creating formulas that calculate impact, trends or team activity is remarkably complicated. Layer in government relations, community engagement or correspondence and it just gets zany. Why spend dozens of hours “reinventing the wheel” when a race car—specifically designed for communicators—already exists?
5. One Value Per Cell
Spreadsheets hate nuance. If you’re trying to track a single media hit that covers three different departments, two campaigns, and is being managed by multiple team members, Excel forces you into “one cell, one value” purgatory. This sucks unless you dig the endless horizontal side scroll. It also leads to messy data and inaccurate reporting because the tool can’t handle the multi-dimensional nature of modern communications teams.
6. AI Needs Structure, Not Digital Slop
We are living in an AI-driven era, but AI is only as good as the data it consumes. Getting info out of Excel is easy; getting it in via manual entry or vibe-coded automations is where the quality drops. Dedicated platforms capture the clean, structured data that’s required for AI to give you actual insights, rather than the generic digital slop produced by tools that don’t understand the context of your work.
7. Digestible Reporting is Difficult
Even with PowerBI or plugins, turning raw rows into executive-ready dashboards is a chore. Comms teams need to move at the speed of the news cycle. If you have to spend three hours formatting a chart just to show your boss the impact of a campaign, you’ve already lost the momentum.
Ready to Swap the Spreadsheet for a Strategy?
If you’re tired of fixing formulas and want to start measuring impact, it’s time to move to a platform built for the modern communicator. Consider Broadsight as your all-in-one system of record. Made for communications teams by communicators.
If you’d like to see Broadsight in action, please get in touch.
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