Think Excel is just for finance? Learn how to use Excel for tech troubleshooting: Spotting misconfigurations, seeing anomalies and patterns.

Tech is fascinating.

Tech is cooler than boring spreadsheets.

But sometimes tech creates problems.

And that’s when spreadsheets come to the engineer’s help. As an entrepreneur and engineer at the helm of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I have the pleasure (or curse) of being involved in finance and tech. Excel is my tool of choice in finance for cash flow management, business planning, scenario analysis, and much more.

And in tech? Excel is an awesome tool for locating and solving problems induced by misconfiguration. Let’s look at an example.

1. Compare Configurations

In our application, we use Keycloak for authentication and authorization. Keycloak is a great tool with vast configuration possibilities. But vast configuration possibilities bring about endless possibilities to introduce configuration errors. Now use a tool like Keycloak for multiple customers and multiple configurations, and you’ll be in trouble.

To make things worse, you need to upgrade even complex frameworks such as Keycloak from time to time. That’s what we did some time ago, and the new Keycloak version introduced even more configuration possibilities.

Of course, not everything worked as expected after the upgrade.

Many people in our team said that Keycloak was too complicated and that they had too little Keycloak knowledge to analyze the problems.

Enter Excel. Because some of our clients’ configurations worked and some didn’t, I decided to go low-tech: I created a huge spreadsheet with all the Keycloak configuration parameters for all our customer configurations.

Some of our engineers silently smiled at me.

2. Mark Anomalies, See Patterns

Once the spreadsheet was complete, I started coloring it. All the customer configs that worked were marked in green. And all the parameters that differed from the working customer configs were marked in yellow.

It quickly became visible that there were just a few parameters that differed across customer configs. Now it was already much easier to pin down problems.

3. Attack Problems One-by-One

Now I changed the non-working configs by adjusting one parameter after the other. Excel makes it easy to log changes that were applied in Keycloak, and in the end, I got every customer configuration to work with this approach without any coding needed.

Conclusion

Now hard-core techies might call me a hobbyist and insist on configurations being in JSON format rather than in Excel. Of course, that’s a valid approach.

But let me share a secret: Tools like ChatGPT are great at transforming configurations between JSON and Excel formats. You can go even so far that you can convert an Excel configuration into a JSON that can then be imported by whatever framework you use, all without coding.

Tech is much more about problem-solving than about coding nowadays.