I’ve argued for a long time that world’s most ubiquitous database is Microsoft Excel. After all, Excel supports a large number of columns, a practically limitless number of rows, auto-filtering and sorting. So what’s wrong with Excel as a database? Here are 10 shortfalls to get the conversation started:

1) It’s cumbersome to store elemental data that might have more than one value per row. For example, let’s say you are using Excel to keep track of applicants for a sales position. You want to keep track of each applicant’s phone number. Most people have two or three phones now. How do you organize that in Excel?

2) It’s way too hard to create a pick list and use that pick list to populate cells. Maybe you want a column called stage in your applicant tracking system - Resume Received;Phone Screen;Interview;Extend Offer; etc. This is possible in Excel, but it’s unbelievably hard. Excel’s help describes how to do this in 9 steps. 3 of the steps are so hard, they hyperlink to another help page.

3) It’s not very visual. Just plain, old boring numbers and text. When I define a range as a date range, why doesn’t Excel embed a calendar control so I can pick a date from the calendar? When I try to insert a photo, why does it feel like it overlays my entire spreadsheet instead of inserting the picture into a cell? Why can’t I simply say that I want all the cells in column to have a checkbox?

4) It’s entombed on my PC. Yes, I can email to you. But now we each have separate copies. What if you update yours and I update mine? How do we reconcile those changes?

5) It’s not multi-user. What if you and I want to work on the database together at the same time?

6) I can’t create meaningful queries. What if I’m a VC and I want to construct a query like "Show me all startups who’ve been into the office for a meeting, were founded less than 12 months ago, are in Seattle and are not yet VC backed." If you have 20 or 30 rows in your Excel database, you can just eyeball it. But what if your deal pipeline tracker has 400 or 500 rows? How do you do that query in Excel (the answer is you don’t. It’s amazing how many VCs I know who are building this pipeline management system in house).

7) I can’t easily save and load multiple views of the same data. What if I have a list of 5,000 sales leads and I want to save some predefined views:

7.1) Leads rated "A" and not contacted in the last 45 days

7.2) Leads in the northwest (southwest, northeast, southeast)

7.3) Leads with an opportunity size > $50,000 and a probability of close > "Good"

7.4) Leads where stage changed to "Lost" within the last 30 days

7.5) Leads where stage equals "New" and Date Created is less than 7 days and source is "website" How do you save these views without bifurcating the raw data?

I can’t easily let someone casually subscribe to updates. If I’m the sales manager, wouldn’t I want to subscribe (via email or RSS) to the view in 7.4 above? Wouldn’t I want to know that as it happens? How do you do that in Excel?

9) What if I want a data entry form on my website to insert rows into my database in Excel? How do I do that, especially when my Excel database is entombed on my PC and my PC is turned off?

10) How do I relate two Excel spreadsheets to each other? If I’m trying to create a project list and I want to keep track of which tasks are assigned to which people resources, shouldn’t I be able to embed part of my people sheet into my project sheet? Of course you should, but making that happen in Excel is incredibly hard.

What we’re building at blist addresses all 10 of these Excel pain points very nicely. It’s as familiar as Excel but designed to be a collaborative, visual database. It’s the world’s easiest database. Have you tested the limits of Excel as a database? We’d love to hear your frustrations and encourage you to sign up for our beta.