Microsoft Excel is one of the most commonly used tools for strategic planning and users are very familiar with it, about 60% of businesses were still using Excel in recent years. Because of this, one might expect that people using it have a favorable view of Excel planning. While Excel is familiar to users, it has many downsides for planning. It requires a lot of manual processes and correction, is prone to errors, has poor or lacks at all version control, and tends to be very slow, maybe even break, when using a lot of data. In this article, we are going to address a few of them and how to minimize them by adding IBM Planning Analytics to Excel.