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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

wsj.com

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#21

Post by brazzledazzle »

megaman22 wrote: post #16
stephengillie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The web editor might be good enough today but it used to choke and wouldn’t open/render all kinds of stuff that’s normal in financial spreadsheets. Thats not even getting into what a shit show SharePoint has been over the years. Microsoft has slowly eroded trust in anything but email sharing and (if there haven’t been missteps within an org with them) file shares.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#22

Post by jasode »

The phrases "avoid data silos" and "we want single source of truth" have been used repeatedly about Excel misuse/abuse/overuse for 20+ years. The WSJ story talks about the complaint but not about the underlying tension between data redundancy vs data manipulation.

Excel endures because it's the non-programmer's REPL for data. Like a Lisp REPL, using Excel is nimble and has an instant feedback loop. Click "A-Z" to sort ascending, click "Z-A" to sort descending. Move/hide/freeze columns. If one has intermediate-to-advanced skills, one can pivot the data on multiple axis. None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities.

That's why the centralized systems like SAP ERP, Microsoft Team Foundation, mainframe sytems, etc offer functionality to export to Excel spreadsheets. (Or they offer export to csv files -- which is 1 step removed from Excel.) With MS TFS, you can even re-import from Excel so in that case, Excel acts as a sort of offline data-entry client for the project management tool.

One middle ground between Excel data silos and the utopia of a centralized system is a shared document store like Sharepoint or Dropbox. The hierarchy would be something like:

1) Excel spreadsheets emailed around. Lots of redundancy; uncertainty of which version is canonical.

2) Excel xls file stored on Sharepoint with automatic version control. Employees must have discipline to only email links to the "one true" spreadsheet and never attach the actual xls file in the emails.

3) The data that was in Excel is migrated to centralized system and all data entry and reporting is done there. However, because the central systems are so cumbersome, this abstraction "leaks" back out to Excel because of the highly desired "export to Excel" functions! (This restarts the dreaded Excel "data silos" complaint cycle all over again.)

There isn't an IT department in the world that can develop centralized IT solutions fast enough to keep up with the ways employees slice & dice data. That's why Excel is "overused".

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#23

Post by tcarn »

rjtavares wrote: post #14
baxtr wrote: post #10

I’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.

Definitely, great point. Tools like Tableau/Power BI make it very easy to get a misleading version of the truth, since it can very easily include misleading data points and/or make calculations in a fashion that leads the user to misinterpret KPIs.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#25

Post by FLUX-YOU »

adekok wrote: post #19

Excel 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 n…

>Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis.

Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#27

Post by Spooky23 »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #5

The 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.

Totally agreed. Especially when the alternative is abusing an ERP for ad hoc reports or using a journey map approach that captures the top X use cases, but misses what is actually needed.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#28

Post by tcarn »

rjtavares wrote: post #17
fiatjaf wrote: post #6

What 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…

I agree. A lot of these tools are coming about because people don't understand how to use excel and frequently Tableau/Power BI is not a better alternative, unless you have no clue about Excel.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#29

Post by adekok »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #25
adekok wrote: post #19

Excel 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 n…

>Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis. Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?

Tell that to tens of thousands of researchers.

Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published:

https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

If the tool doesn't work correctly by default. Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job.

The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.

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