Tability vs. spreadsheets: 4 key features that will upgrade your OKRs and goal-tracking

We are again at the start of a new quarter, and many of us are re-evaluating our OKRs and starting fresh with some new goals. Traditionally, spreadsheets have been used to track objectives and key results (OKRs), but they can be tedious and time-consuming to maintain. While spreadsheets are a great way to start your OKR journey, you'll learn that Spreadsheets are not a scalable solution for OKRs, and your productivity, team engagement, and overall success on your goals will suffer. 

Key issues with tracking your OKRs in spreadsheets

Now spreadsheets are a potent and necessary tool in any business – but have you ever used it to track your tasks like a Jira? Or to create a presentation like a Powerpoint? No. OKRs are much more complex and have specific functionalities that a general tool like spreadsheets can't provide. Some of the critical problems with tracking OKRs in spreadsheets:

1. It's hard to find your docs. We all have hundreds of Google Docs, and Spreadsheets shared with us every day. It can become a challenge even to keep track of where your OKRs documents are. Keep your goals from getting lost in a disorganized pile of documents.
2. Historical data. Quite often, you're reusing the same cells and overwriting old data. It's hard to understand where you started or how far you still have to go.
3. Sending reminders is a chore. With spreadsheets, there is no automation, so you're doing all the work yourself or constantly sending tedious reminders to your team to update their goals.

Those are just some of the main problems with tracking OKRs in spreadsheets. As you can probably imagine, there are more and more problems as you scale, and Spreadsheets simply aren't made to be good with OKRs.

Key benefits of switching to Tability

Fortunately, OKR software tools like Tability have emerged, offering a more effective way to track and manage OKRs without adding complexity to your workflow. In this article, we'll explore three advantages that Tability has over spreadsheets.

Visualization of Progress: See Your Progress at a Glance

Tability offers a variety of graphs and charts that allow you to see the progress of your OKRs in real-time. These visualizations can help you identify trends and patterns you may not have noticed otherwise. For example, your goals have visuals and graphs that can show you the trajectory of your goal. By seeing the trend of past goals, you can make a more informed analysis of your progress and get a more realistic view of your goals.

Without context, you may think you're doing well if you're at 80% of your goal. You mark it green, as it's on track to reach the goal. But take a step back. If you look at where you were the past two or three weeks and see that you were at 95% before and now starting to slope down, you might think otherwise. 

With visual graphs, Tability shows you that trend and that contextual data that help you better judge the health of your business goals.

Link tasks to OKRs: Action items to help you make progress on your goals

Now as important as it is to track progress on your goals, it's just as important to be able to take action on them. If you sense your progress lagging or your numbers falling behind, it's essential to be able to create action items based on that knowledge. 

A goal measures the effectiveness of the work that you're doing, and your tasks are the things you do to move the needle. The relationship between these two things is a two-way street, where one informs the other constantly. 

Tability makes adding tasks and action items to your goals easy, so you can plan ways to reach them more effectively without switching contexts. You'll also find 9 more dashboards to map strategic projects to business goals.

Presentation mode: Create a keynote of your progress instantly

There are stakeholders for every project or business. Whether you're a startup presenting to your investors or a manager presenting the quarterly numbers to a CEO or leadership, you have to create reports and find ways to show this data properly.

With Tability, you can do that with one click (literally). Tability's presentation mode puts all your OKRs in a keynote or powerpoint-like format, so it's easy to share and show off in your meeting.

If you were doing everything manually in a spreadsheet, you'd have to create graphs and charts manually and create a presentation from scratch on PowerPoint. That's a lot of work when you can have a tool like Tability that automatically takes accurate data and pre-populates a presentation for you to show off.

Automated reminders and notifications: Stay accountable and on track

Tability also offers automated reminders and notifications, automatically getting your team involved when necessary (and only then!). The beauty of Tability is that it's designed to be easy for your team and help them keep focus without disrupting their workflow. Nobody wants a reporting tool they have to update constantly, so Tability makes it easy to do and never takes up more than 5 minutes of your team member's time. 

By having automated reminders, you can ensure that progress is updated regularly without you having to tap them constantly on the shoulders. Keeping people involved and reminding them to update and track progress helps create a healthy weekly OKR ritual to hold everyone accountable and help prevent OKRs from slipping through the cracks.

Tability is a huge upgrade to your OKRs

While spreadsheets have been a traditional tool for tracking OKRs, they can lead to several problems, such as disorganization, historical data loss, and the need for constant manual reminders. Tability, on the other hand, offers several advantages that can help make OKR tracking more effective, such as visualization of progress, the ability to link tasks to OKRs, presentation mode, and automated reminders and notifications. 

Moving your OKRs from Spreadsheets to Tability will upgrade your OKR process instantly. Using a tool like Tability ensures that your OKRs are tracked efficiently and effectively, leading to increased productivity, team engagement, better decision-making, and more success in achieving your goals.