Beyond Excel: Smarter Ways to Manage Your Product Data
For decades, Excel has been a go-to tool for managing product data. It’s flexible, widely understood, and requires little more than a spreadsheet and some basic know-how to get started.
From small product catalogs to seasonal price lists and supplier consolidations, Excel has long helped businesses manage data quickly and simply. But product data isn’t what it used to be. In today’s omnichannel world, where information must be accurate, consistent, and instantly available across multiple platforms, managing it all in spreadsheets alone can become a challenge.
The question is no longer if Excel works, but whether it can keep up with today’s demands.
The Strengths of Excel for Product Data: Why Does It Still Work?
Even with the rise of specialized product data management tools, Excel continues to be a trusted workhorse. It’s not just a leftover from the pre-cloud era. It remains a reliable tool for flexible, ad-hoc product data tasks.
Low Cost and Immediate Availability
Most organizations already have Microsoft Office or access to Google Sheets, meaning there’s no extra software to purchase or integrate. This makes spreadsheet software an appealing, cost-effective tool for small businesses needing to organize a product catalog or perform quick data manipulation.
Universally Familiar to Teams
Almost everyone in a business environment can use Excel at least at a basic level. It requires neither major entry hurdles nor extensive training.
Highly Flexible for Ad-Hoc Needs
Excel’s blank-grid nature means you can adapt it to almost any structure you like, whether that’s a simple flat table of SKUs (unique product identifiers) or a more complex workbook with multiple tabs.
Ideal for Small Catalogs and Static Data
If you’re dealing with a small number of products, and changes happen only occasionally, Excel can be all you need.
Suitable for one-off projects or as a temporary data store
Sometimes, product data management is only needed for a short period, such as during a catalog migration or while consolidating supplier lists.
Strong Offline Capabilities
Unlike cloud-only tools, Excel works perfectly offline. This is valuable for field teams or remote operations where internet access may be unreliable.
Where Excel Struggles in Modern Product Data Management
Excel is undeniably powerful, but it was never built to manage the scale, compliance demands, and dynamic workflows of today’s product data needs. As businesses deal with larger catalogs, richer product attributes, and multiple sales channels, spreadsheets start to feel stretched thin.
The problem isn’t that Excel is “bad”, it’s that it was built for a different kind of work.
Scaling Product Lines Becomes Risky
What works perfectly for 50 SKUs can become unmanageable with 5,000. As rows multiply, so do risks of duplication, missing fields, and human error.
One accidental paste can overwrite hundreds of product descriptions without any alert, and the mistake might only be spotted days later.
Struggling with Multiple Data Sources
Tracking and managing product information today is rarely as simple as pulling it from a single inventory or supplier data source. Instead, you’re dealing with a mix of supplier data feeds, ERP system exports, image libraries, and marketplace-specific requirements. All these sources—ERP exports, image libraries, inventory databases—must be centralized and validated before they become usable.
In Excel, that usually means a lot of manual work. You’re importing files one at a time, copy-pasting values, and reformatting columns so they match. It’s tedious, repetitive, and easy to make mistakes.
The Struggle of Collaborating in Excel
Excel works well for many tasks, but coordinating updates among multiple people can require extra care. While cloud-based versions allow for shared access, teams still need clear processes to keep edits organized and avoid duplication. For example, if two team members are updating different parts of a product list, one focused on electronics, the other on home goods, and they’re each working from separate copies, there’s a risk that changes may be lost or overwritten when files are merged.
Limited Data Governance and Compliance Controls
In regulated industries like food, cosmetics, or electronics, keeping product information accurate and traceable isn’t optional, it’s a compliance requirement. Regulations change, records must be kept, and every piece of data needs to be verifiable.
Excel, however, offers none of the built-in safeguards you’d expect for this kind of work. There are no native validation rules to ensure data meets regulatory standards, no approval workflows to confirm changes before they go live, and no automated checks to flag outdated or incorrect entries.
Omnichannel Publishing is Manual and Time-Consuming
Modern products don’t just live in one place. They need to appear consistently across websites, mobile apps, online marketplaces, social commerce platforms, printed catalogs, and more. Every channel has its own requirements for formatting, imagery, and data fields.
When you’re working in Excel, preparing product data for each of these channels is almost always a separate job. You end up creating individual sheets, reformatting columns, and exporting files one by one. It’s a slow, error-prone process.
Lack of Automation for Repetitive Processes
Excel is great at crunching numbers, but when it comes to integrating with other systems or automating repetitive tasks, it falls short. It can’t natively trigger product updates, run approval workflows, or push changes out to publishing platforms without a lot of manual intervention.
That means even simple, predictable changes like syncing product updates can turn into time-consuming chores.
Limitations in Handling Rich Media and Digital Assets
Product information today goes far beyond text and numbers. Images, videos, 3D renderings, and other digital assets which require structured organization and intelligent data governance. But Excel was never built to manage these types of files. At best, it can store a file path or hyperlink. It can’t preview, organize, or validate the assets themselves.
This means you often have to maintain external folders, rely on strict naming conventions, and hope everyone follows them consistently.
PIM System: Enhancement to Excel, Not Replacement
Adopting a Product Information Management (PIM) system doesn’t mean saying goodbye to Excel. For many organizations, it’s about building on what Excel already does well.
Excel shines when you need quick data manipulation, fast calculations, or one-off analysis. It’s ideal for smaller, contained projects where flexibility matters more than process control. But as your product data grows and needs to flow across multiple teams, channels, and systems, Excel’s manual workflows start to slow things down.
That’s where a PIM comes in. Think of it as the central nervous system for your product information. It adds structure, enforces consistency, integrates with other platforms, and automates routine updates, all while keeping your data accurate and ready for omnichannel publishing.
How PIM Differs from Excel
While Excel is a general-purpose spreadsheet, a PIM is purpose-built for product data governance and omnichannel publishing.
Key differences include:
Centralized, Single Source of Truth
- Excel: Often multiple copies exist in different email threads or folders, leading to version confusion.
- PIM: One central database that everyone works from, ensuring data consistency across teams and channels.
Structured Data and Validation Rules
- Excel: Can apply basic data validation, but rules are manual and easy to bypass.
- PIM: Enforces required fields, attribute formats, and taxonomies, reducing the risk of incomplete or incorrect product data.
Collaboration with Role-Based Access
- Excel: All-or-nothing access; collaboration can lead to overwriting and conflicts.
- PIM: Different permissions for product managers, marketers, translators, and suppliers, all working in parallel without overwriting each other.
Automated Integration with Other Systems
- Excel: Requires manual exports/imports or custom scripts.
- PIM: Connects via APIs to ERP, CMS, marketplaces, print systems, and more, pushing updates automatically.
Multi-Channel Publishing
- Excel: Separate exports for each channel, manually formatted.
- PIM: Channel-specific templates and rules ensure each marketplace, web store, or print catalog receives the right data in the right format instantly.
Rich Media Management
- Excel: Can store file links but cannot manage, preview, or distribute media.
- PIM: Often integrates DAM (Digital Asset Management) features, linking each SKU to approved images, videos, and documents.
When Does PIM Makes Sense?
A PIM becomes valuable when the complexity of product data outgrows what Excel can comfortably handle. Scenarios include:
Rapidly Expanding Product Range
Adding hundreds or thousands of SKUs, each with multiple attributes and variants.
Multiple Data Sources and Stakeholders
Supplier feeds, internal teams, and external agencies, all contributing to product information.
Omnichannel Sales Strategy
Selling on multiple platforms (own web store, Amazon, wholesale, print catalogs) and needing consistency across all.
Global Markets and Multilingual Needs
Managing translations, local compliance requirements, and region-specific product details.
Frequent Updates or Seasonal Changes
Regularly updating prices, descriptions, images, or technical specs, without risking outdated information being left in circulation.
Compliance and Quality Control Requirements
Industries with strict regulations (food, medical, safety) that demand up to date, verified product data.
NovaDB PIM: Hand in hand with Excel
Excel-friendly workflow
The NovaDB Excel add-in allows teams to edit content and product data directly in Microsoft Excel – in the familiar interface, without having to log into the PIM system. A practical example: Suppliers often send their product lists as Excel files. These can be opened, supplemented or corrected by the teams directly before being returned to NovaDB via the Excel add-in. After the changes have been made, the data is imported via rule-based validation and import flows. The add-in not only supports smooth data exchange, but also collaboration: multiple team members can work on product data in parallel, responsibilities are clearly defined, and external suppliers can be easily integrated. This makes processes more transparent, coordination faster, and reduces sources of error.
Mapping and mass data processing
Another advantage: the add-in allows large amounts of product data to be adjusted and mapped simultaneously. Often, suppliers' designations or classifications do not match your own naming conventions. Mapping therefore means clearly assigning these columns or attributes to the appropriate fields in NovaDB – for example, if the supplier column “Item No.” is assigned to the “Product ID” field in NovaDB or the ‘Color’ column is matched with the “Color” attribute. This allows different supplier information to be transferred to your own system, attribute values to be maintained consistently across many products, or entire categories of descriptions to be updated in a single step. This saves time, reduces manual work, and minimizes errors.ConclusionThe NovaDB Excel add-in combines the familiar way of working in Excel with the advantages of a professional PIM system. Teams benefit from faster processing, clear processes, and consistent data quality. Excel is not replaced, but rather expanded in a meaningful way – for efficient collaboration and reliable product data.
Conclusion
Excel has earned its place as a versatile and dependable tool for managing product data, especially in simpler, low-volume scenarios. But as catalogs grow, channels multiply, and data quality becomes mission-critical, its limitations become harder to ignore.
A PIM system like NovaDB doesn’t replace Excel—it builds on its strengths, adding structure, automation, and scalability to meet modern demands. The right choice depends on your business’s complexity and growth plans but knowing when and how to combine these tools can turn product data from a maintenance burden into a competitive advantage.
As organizations look to scale product lines, improve collaboration, and meet the demands of omnichannel commerce, smarter tools like NovaDB PIM offer structured, automated, and scalable alternatives to traditional spreadsheets, turning product data into a true competitive asset.
