Google Sheets fixed the worst thing about Excel: everyone edits one live file. For a design studio, that’s genuine progress — until the “one file” becomes forty tabs, the tabs become forty more files, and the formulas linking them become a haunted house nobody dares renovate.

Real-time collaboration on flat data is still flat data. The problems that matter to a studio — specs, schedules, budgets, clients, phases — are relational problems, and no amount of sharing fixes structure.

Where shared spreadsheets hit the wall

• Tab sprawl is the new version sprawl. One workbook per project, tabs per room, a “master” sheet linking them with IMPORTRANGE — until someone renames a tab and the pyramid collapses.

• Flat rows, relational reality. A product belongs to a supplier, appears in multiple rooms, carries a budget line, an approval status, and a cut sheet. Spreadsheet rows can’t model that; databases exist because of that.

• Anyone can edit anything. Live collaboration without record-level permissions means a well-meaning intern can reshape the fee tracker. There’s no field validation, no required data, no audit trail worth the name.

• Attachments live elsewhere. Cut sheets in Drive, approvals in Gmail, images in a folder — the spreadsheet points at things instead of holding them.

• Client-facing means copy-paste. Every issued schedule and budget summary is manually reformatted, again, for every issue.