Our passwords are in a spreadsheet. What should we do instead?

The spreadsheet is nearly universal and it is worth being clear about why it is a problem, rather than just saying it is bad practice.

A spreadsheet of passwords can be copied without trace, emailed, left in a Downloads folder, synced to a personal cloud account, and opened by anyone who reaches that file. It does not tell you who looked at what, it cannot be revoked from one person, and it goes stale the moment somebody changes a password without updating it. If it lives on a shared drive, everyone who can see that drive can see everything you own.

We deploy Keeper for clients. What changes in practice: each person has their own vault, shared credentials are shared deliberately rather than by everyone holding the file, access is revoked in seconds when someone leaves, and you get a record of who accessed what.

The rollout is less painful than people expect. Import the spreadsheet, get everyone signed in, set up the shared folders for the credentials teams genuinely need in common, then delete the spreadsheet properly rather than leaving it renamed as old_passwords.xlsx.

Do the deletion part. We still find the original spreadsheet on the drive a year later more often than not.