Struggling with prototyping? Explore Excel.

As a professional business analyst practitioner and trainer, I have come across many BAs who feel one must learn a special tool to develop user interfaces.

At worst, they settle down with Microsoft Visio. There is actually a secret tool that all of us already know but we do not use the power of the tool.

It is Microsoft Excel.

In fact, Microsoft Excel has many advantages over Visio. Few are:

1. You get perfect alignment of controls on excel
2. Has many built in validations
3. Can show application navigations
4. Excel has built-in validations for drop downs, number, date etc.
5. Graphs and charts are easy with Excel
6. If you wish to show computations, Excel is master at that
7. You can show grouping / un-grouping (Collapse / Expand)
8. With VB extension, you get many more controls
9. With Office 365, it can be edited by multiple stakeholders
10. Last, Visio is extra license fees; Excel is bundled with MS Office.

Will be happy to learn any other best practice of using excel for developing User Interfaces.

Cheers and have a good day.