The spreadsheet nobody else can open
Most businesses still run something important in a spreadsheet one person understands. What the 2026 numbers say, what it looked like at one company I worked for, and what to do about it this week.
Out there
In March 2026, inFlow Inventory and the research firm OvationMR asked 400 people in the United States who run warehouse, inventory, supply chain or operations work how they keep track of stock. 84.8 percent said spreadsheets. 52.5 percent use spreadsheets and nothing else. Only 22 percent use software built for the job.
I expected that to be a small-shop habit. It isn't. In the same survey, 53 percent of companies with 500 or more employees still run inventory mainly on spreadsheets.
It's a vendor survey, so take it as one. But the shape matches every IT job I ever held. Somewhere in the building there was always a file that the business quietly depended on, and it was never the one with the budget.
Spreadsheets earn their place. They're already paid for, they're already installed, nobody needs a training day, and the person who builds one shapes it to the business exactly. That last part is the strength and the trap in one feature. The file fits the business because it fits one person's head.
In here
I'll tell you about one. At a company I worked for, IT started a list of every piece of software in the building. Not just the name. Who owned it, what it cost, what it did, who used it, when the contract renewed. The point wasn't only to know what we had. It was to find the overlap: three tools doing one job, licenses still being paid for software nobody had opened in a year.
One person can't fill in a list like that, so it went out by email to everyone who knew a piece of the answer. That's where it went wrong, slowly. People sent back their updates as attachments. Some of those made it into the master and some didn't. The master became Master v1, then v2, v3, v4, and each version went out to team members to work from, and each of them saved a copy to their own machine so they could add notes. The notes went into the copy. The copy never came back. When someone left, their copy left with them, and the research they'd done on their twenty rows got done again by whoever inherited the question.
It never failed in a way anyone noticed. It just quietly cost the same work two and three times, and by the end nobody could say which version was the truth.
If you're thinking "we don't have one of those," it's the file you're picturing right now.
I built Smart Lists partly because of files like that, which tells you something about how I spend my evenings. Here is what Nexus does with one.
It takes the spreadsheet as it is. A Smart List in Nexus imports from Excel, a CSV file or a Word table. Your columns come along with their types: text, numbers, currency, dates, checkboxes, pick-lists and links. You get a grid you can edit in place, search, sort and filter, up to 10,000 rows. When you need Excel back, export and you have it.
Then it stops being a file. Turn the list into a Resources section and it becomes a permanent part of your workspace. Each row is now a record with its own notes and files, it can be tied to the jobs and the people it belongs to, and it shows everywhere it's used. Anyone you allow can open it, wherever they are, and when they add a note it's on the record, not in a copy on their laptop. There is one version, and it's the one everyone is looking at.
That is the principle behind most of Nexus: if you track it in a spreadsheet today, you can track it here, connected to the work it's for.
Two honest limits. Smart Lists start on the Basic plan; the Free plan doesn't include them. And some spreadsheets should stay spreadsheets. If your file is really a model, with formulas chained across tabs, Nexus lists won't run it and I won't pretend otherwise. The file worth moving is the one that holds records the whole business needs to see.
What to do Monday
Name the file out loud. Then pick one copy and declare it the only one. Put it somewhere shared, tell everyone the attachments stop today, and give it a second keeper who knows how it's built. Write the color code and the "don't insert a row here" rules on the first tab.
That costs nothing, takes an hour, and ends the version problem today, whatever software you use. It would have saved that software list about four versions' worth of work.
If you then want the file to live where the work lives, that's part of what Nexus is for: nerthos.com.
Sources
- inFlow Inventory and OvationMR, State of Inventory Management 2026, survey of 400 U.S. operations professionals fielded March 2026, published June 30, 2026.