The issues raised in this article are far less about failings of Excel but rather typical failures of business to plan long term and put effort/resources into comprehensive solutions.
Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
11–20 of 435 posts
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#12The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organizati…
Every email reply becomes an independent fork of the data inside the spreadsheet. The issue is storing and sending the file locally, and the solution is storing it in a centralized location. Cloud storage is often used towards this end, but on-premises file shares work very well too.
This is one of those solved problems that companies inexplicably keep working to solve again.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#13The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organizati…
This is a key point. It's easy to branch data, but painful to merge it.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#14I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons - excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc - speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying - analysis: It's ea…
I agree with those 3 reasons, but I wouldd add a fourth: easy to create your own version of the truth.
I'm not implying this is due to nefarious reasons (though sometimes it is): sometimes the official version of the truth is just not adequate.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#15What should we use, then? I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data. After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on tha…
That's a hard question to answer and depends on your size and what you really need.
For small companies, Excel may really be all that you need. But at a certain size, you might want to use something like PowerBI instead since it will also pull directly from the database and you can share the dashboards you create very easily. Large companies like the article are referring to might be able to get by with PowerBI (Microsoft would certainly argue there are still plenty of places where it works) or ERP/HR tools more specifically designed for certain uses.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organizati…
Every email reply becomes an independent fork of the data inside the spreadsheet. The issue is storing and sending the file locally, and the solution is storing it in a centralized location. Cloud storage is often used towards this end, but on-premises file shares work very well too. This is one of those solved problems that companies inexplicably keep working to solve again.
It's such a bizarrely difficult uphill battle. We have Office 365, with a damned good web editor, and the ability to save directly to OneDrive/Sharepoint from the desktop client, with the versioning that that supports, and we still end up with shit emailed all over and files with version-12.xlsx and -$DATE.xlsx saved here, there, and everywhere.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#17What should we use, then? I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data. After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on tha…
Teach people how to use excel properly:
- treat inputs and outputs separately
- always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles, basic vlookups for relationships, etc.)
- use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the pivot tables.
EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the same...
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#18I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming.
It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming.
Within the Amazon warehouse world, I have seen incredible innovation using it. An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers lives while serving in Afghanistan[0].
I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#19Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pap...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-...
he authors found that Microsoft Excel would often interpret “SEPT2”, which corresponds to the gene Septin 2, as “September 2nd”. The programme also tended to mistake identification codes like “2310009E13” for numbers in scientific notation—in this particular instance, the code would be read as 2.310009 times 101
Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis.
Plus, it's limited precision can cause errors such as subtractive cancellation, etc. In order to correctly calculate complex formulae, the calculations must be done with an understanding of the limitations of the computers.
e.g. you don't calculate (a^2-b^2) for large 'a' and 'b'. Instead, you calculate (a+b)*(a-b). That has the same mathematical result, but is not affected by subtractive cancellation.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#20What should we use, then? I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data. After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on tha…
Teach people how to use excel properly: - treat inputs and outputs separately - always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles, basic vlookups for relationships, etc.) - use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the pivot tables. EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the s…
- finally, pray that Excel won't corrupt your data (be very wary of dates, texts only composed of digits, and different decimal separators)