Spreadsheets aren’t the problem. Copy-paste is.

Spreadsheets are brilliant. The trouble starts when the same number lives in five of them.

Almost every growing business runs on spreadsheets at some point, and that is fine. They are flexible, familiar and free.

The problem appears when information is copied between them. Every copy is a chance for a typo, an outdated figure, or two people working from different versions of the truth.

The fix is rarely to ban spreadsheets. It is to give each important piece of information one home — a single source of truth — and let everything else read from it.