When your tools wait for your signal

Three announcements today circle the same idea: the tools businesses rely on are being judged less on how fast they move and more on how much control and connection they give you. A spreadsheet that waits for your signal, a planning system wired into the sheet people already use, and a frank look at companies that have stopped growing all point to a market settling into adulthood.

A spreadsheet that recalculates when you say so

Most spreadsheets recalculate automatically. Every time you change a cell, the application re-runs every formula that could be affected and updates the result on screen. For a small sheet this is instant and you never notice it. For a large one — tens of thousands of rows, nested lookups, references that chain across many tabs — each edit can trigger a wave of recalculation that makes the file feel slow. You type a number, and you wait.

Google has added a setting that changes this behaviour. The company says it is "introducing a new manual calculation setting in Google Sheets to give you precise control over when formulas and other references update" [1]. In plain terms, you can tell the sheet to stop recalculating on every keystroke and instead recalculate only when you ask it to. For someone building a dense financial model, that is the difference between a tool that fights you and one that stays out of the way until you are ready.

The idea is worth understanding before you reach for it, because it carries a real trade-off. When calculation is automatic, the number you see is always current. When you pause it, the number on screen can be stale — it reflects the last time you recalculated, not the last edit you made. That is fine while you are entering data in bulk, and dangerous if you forget to recalculate before you send the figure to someone who will act on it. The feature does not make a spreadsheet safer; it makes it faster and hands the responsibility for freshness back to you.

This is also a signal about the kind of work a spreadsheet is being asked to do. A tool that needs a manual pause button is a tool being pushed near its limit. That is not a criticism of the spreadsheet — it is one of the most useful inventions in business software — but it is a cue to ask whether the job has outgrown it. We have written before about when a spreadsheet stops being enough, and a model heavy enough to need manual calculation is often sitting right on that line.

Planning software reaching into the sheet you already use

The second announcement is about connection rather than control. Dedicated planning systems — the software finance teams use for budgeting, forecasting and scenario modelling — hold the authoritative numbers for a business. Spreadsheets hold the working numbers people actually touch each day. The gap between the two is usually bridged by hand: someone exports from the planning system, pastes into a sheet, works on it, then keys the result back in. Every manual hop is a chance for a copy-paste error and a version that no longer matches the source.

Google describes a new add-on that closes some of that gap. It explains that "Workday for Google Sheets is a new add-on available in the Google Workspace Marketplace that connects Workday Adaptive Planning directly to Google Sheets and Slides" [2]. The point for a business choosing tools is not the specific products named. It is the pattern: planning data flowing into the place where people already work, so the sheet reads from the system of record rather than from a stale export.

That pattern is the right one, and it is worth holding the principle separately from any one vendor. When your systems are connected, the number in the spreadsheet is the number in the plan, and a change in one is visible in the other. When they are not, you maintain two truths and spend your time reconciling them. This is the whole argument behind why your tools do not talk to each other: disconnected tools do not just waste time, they quietly let your figures drift apart.

There is a trade-off here too, and it is about dependence. An add-on that pulls live data into a spreadsheet also means the spreadsheet now depends on that connection, on the permissions behind it, and on whoever controls the source system. That is usually a good trade — one source of truth beats several — but it is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering later that a critical report breaks when an access token lapses. At 360REV we treat connections between modules as something that should degrade clearly when a feed is unavailable, rather than fail silently, and the same standard is fair to ask of any integration you adopt.

When a company stops growing

The third item is not a product at all. It is a piece about careers and company health, and it matters to anyone evaluating a vendor. SaaStr makes the case that joining a company growing slowly, or not at all, can be a sound choice: "So there’s a new option for seasoned B2B execs now: join something growing … 0%" [3]. The article frames this as a career move, but the underlying point reaches further.

For years, growth rate was treated as the single measure of whether a software company was healthy. A business choosing tools absorbed that assumption without noticing. Fast growth looked like safety; flat growth looked like decline. The reality is more mixed. A company growing at zero may be shrinking toward the exit, or it may be profitable, stable, and investing in the product its existing customers rely on. Those are very different situations that produce the same growth number.

The lesson for a buyer is to stop reading growth as a proxy for health and look at what actually keeps your business running. Does the vendor still ship fixes? Can you export your data cleanly? Is support answered by a person? A steady, profitable supplier that is not chasing new logos may be a better long-term home for your workflow than a fast-growing one that could be acquired or pivot away from you. This is the same discipline behind choosing software worth using and what enterprise-grade should mean to a small business: judge a tool by whether it serves you reliably, not by how loudly it is growing.

Taken together, the day's news rewards the same habits. Keep control over when your numbers change. Connect your systems so there is one truth, not several. And when you weigh a supplier, look past the growth headline to whether the thing will still be there, working, when you need it.