I work on a tiny team and inherited a fairly messy and out-of-date list of leaders of partner organizations and our general members. I am looking into CRMs but we don't have complex needs and don't sell anything, so a lot of the selling points of CRMs don't do anything for us.

I wanted to start a discussion to see if it is actually feasible to use Excel (or Google Sheets as it would be easiest for collaborating with my colleagues, and since we use Google Workspace as our backend) as a database, with the idea that I could have a master sheet with entries for people and organizations alike, including a bunch of columns, and then in the same spreadsheet have other worksheets that offer a tailored look at only certain criteria. So all of the data "lives" on the first worksheet, but then certain formulas can be in other sheets so that we end up looking primarily at those based on category. So for example, one worksheet could show heads of organizations only, which would be based on a column saying "Head" in the master worksheet, and only display name, email, and organization for simplicity's sake, despite having perhaps a dozen or more columns in the master worksheet.

I don't want or need any kind of integration where it ties into my inbox or external address book. I honestly prefer having it be a spreadsheet that I manually add info to.

I'm sure this kind of thing has been discussed before, so I'm here to see if it's doable, and if so, ask best practices, learn good formulas, take a look at templates/examples, et cetera. Thank you!

Hello all,

Looking for some advice. I am not an Excel novice, but this one is stumping me a little.

I need to create a robust and searchable contact list. Currently, I have this as several individual tables in an Outlook email, that I update as-and-when. I feel as though Excel has a solution, but I’m struggling to visualise it.

The individual tables I have are “departments”. Within the table itself the headings are: Company, Name, Email, Phone, and Notes.

The same people might appear in multiple tables for various reasons, but mostly the tables are unique.

I literally can’t visualise a way to do this that is clean. The best I have right now is stick it all in a single data set, and filter down. But I imagine there has to be a cleaner, and more optimal way to do this. Does anyone have any suggestions? I would be really grateful if so.

I made this comment on another post about printing too many invites, but thought it might help others.

For anyone using a spreadsheet for their guest list, the below template has a Subtotal Count formula that will count how many addresses are filled and use that to calculate how many prints you need. You would only fill in one for any group at the same address. For example, my guest list is 154 total but only 89 prints of Save The Dates, Invites, and Thank You Cards are needed. The count also updates based on which filters are selected.

https://i.imgur.com/7skM9wX.jpg

Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SEv-XkEYdIRcuZmGm8VH-wsxgcqhNIZKrJeX7xAewsM/edit?usp=sharing