Why Your Vendors Don’t Open Your Spreadsheet | The Spreadsheet Series

Spreadsheets were built for numbers—not collaboration.

You know the moment:
You’ve spent hours cleaning up a spreadsheet before sharing it with a vendor, color-coded tabs, locked cells, thoughtful comments in Column AL (yes, we’ve seen spreadsheets go through the alphabet in columns).

You email it over with a helpful message like:

“Here’s everything you need, let me know if you have questions!”

And two hours later, you get:

“Could you just send me the parts that apply to us?”

Cue the sigh.

You didn’t do anything wrong.
But you did send a file your vendor doesn’t want to deal with.

Vendors Want Clarity. Spreadsheets Create Friction.

Your AV team doesn’t want to dig through your 13-tab workbook to find which rooms have power drops.
Your catering partner doesn’t want to scroll through three pages of merged cells and conditional formatting to confirm break schedules.
Your venue? They're probably printing it, and then emailing questions about page 7.

Even the best spreadsheet isn’t intuitive to someone outside your planning brain.

“I sent a spec sheet to a venue contact, and they replied asking if I could extract just the pages with food and beverage. There were only three tabs—and that was still too many.”
— Planner managing 300+ person corporate conference

The Misalignment Is Structural

The challenge isn’t just how much you’re sending—it’s that spreadsheets aren’t designed for targeted, contextual sharing.

They’re flat.
Everything lives on a grid.
Everyone sees the same thing, whether it applies to them or not.

You end up reformatting, summarizing, or screen-grabbing sections of your own planning doc—just to make the information vendor-friendly.

That’s not collaboration. That’s translating.

When Things Get Lost in Translation

Ever sent a spreadsheet, only to find the vendor:

• Ignored your dietary restrictions column?

• Missed the “Notes” tab because it was tucked at the end?

• Pulled details from an outdated export?

• Overwrote the file and sent it back to you as a PDF?

It’s not their fault. They're not trying to make your life harder.
They just don’t work in spreadsheets the way planners do.

And when communication breaks down, your flawless plan suddenly becomes a liability.

You Become the Middleman…Again

So what happens next?

You start copy-pasting key info into emails.
You build separate PDFs “just for AV” or “just for catering.”
You create one-pagers. Recaps. Call sheets. Cheat sheets.

You become a human interface for your own spreadsheet.

And while that feels like good service, it’s actually wasted time.

What Vendors Want Instead

Vendors don’t want your entire plan—they want the part that applies to them, in a format they can act on. Quickly.

• A filtered view of their assigned rooms

• A schedule that only includes their run-of-show

• A layout of what they need to know, not what you need to track

That’s where spreadsheets fall apart—and where purpose-built tools shine.

The Trust Gap

When vendors ignore your spreadsheet, they’re not ignoring you—they’re avoiding confusion.

But from your side, it feels like a lack of buy-in. You start to double-confirm everything. Overcommunicate. Resend updates in multiple formats.

That trust gap adds friction—and that friction adds time.

 

 

If your vendors won’t use it, it’s not working.

Vendors shouldn’t need a decoder ring to understand your event plan. If they’re skipping over spreadsheets or asking for recaps in email, your process is slowing everyone down. Collaboration should be seamless, not another to-do.

Pholeo makes it easy to share just the information each stakeholder needs—clearly, cleanly, and on time. Request a demo to see how it works.