I think all the features he listed as reasons to switch away from excel are in excel. IMHO the issue there may be more training, process and good data management.
Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#62I 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…
When I consulted at a health insurance company (a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with 1000 employees, 200 IT staff) about 10 years ago, I was absolutely horrified that the system of record for health care plan data was Excel spreadsheets. They had staff who would update the claims processing system based on thousands of spreadsheets. When you called customer service, the CSR app would auto-open the member's plan inf…
There are upsides to excel in cases like that…
The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently…
I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and those advantages erode as the setup gets more complex and/or has more people using it. But, there are reasons excel gets used this way.
The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs.
I’m going to repeat again that I am not advocating health insurance companies run policies and claims in excel. It is a bad idea, almost certainly. I am saying that we should be curious at why they are doing it this way. I think it’s a “good” question in that it leads to interesting places.
If the excel team was blessed with a plague of inspiration tomorrow morning, Is there a way they could make it so that excel is the right way to manage an insurance business?
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#63The 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 sor…
None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities.
You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#64I've worked with customers to setup support units specifically for Excel, helping their organisations develop and validate Excel spreadsheets and consider migration to more robust solutions when the time is right. As much as I dislike the general use of Excel there is an inescapable fact, Excel is a great source of bottom up innovation and ideas from non programmers which we should endeavour to capture and not just forbid.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#65> “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said
This!
I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor via search/replace), and if they are "very sophisticated" they save it in MS Access, join tables, connect the dots, export back to Excel, analyse the data via Pivot Tables etc. And they do these steps repeatedly, every week. Without stopping and asking if there might be better solutions out there. (In German IT curriculums they call this "Medienbruch" = "media discontinuity"?)
I have seen this in so many companies and thought to myself: This is an excellent case for a consulting pitch. And I could literally transform their work.
And I am not talking about selling data warehouse solutions with ETL processes and the like.
Twenty years ago I realized I could do all these preprocessing and transformations with Perl. Now I do these kind of things with Python and Pandas etc. So there are so many solutions that are a huge improvement. Still these departments do it with Excel/VBA/Access.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#66I worked at nPower, in MIS, they used to link about 16 spreadsheets together because they "didn't like" SQL. These are one of the UKs big six energy companies.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#67It is amazing how many simple tasks at a company can be done with Excel that as programmers we often write custom code for. When all you have is a hammer...
At the same time. I have seen banks transfer money between branches by literally FTP transferring an Excel file. At some point there has got to be a better way. At least use SFTP :)
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ ?
Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful
Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#69This feels a lot like a submarine ad.
Also if this guy thinks he's going to escape silos by putting everything in the cloud, he's quite mistaken. The cloud is just code running somewhere else. It does not change fundamental computing paradigms.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#70I 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…
Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
PowerPoint, while popular, has no where near the widespread use of Excel. In most businesses, PowerPoint is the sort of thing you use once a month, once a week maybe if you are doing a lot of meetings. Excel gets used daily or even hourly by members of almost every department in businesses large and small.
I would agree with OP that Excel is the most-used programming environment of all time