Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#71

Post by crispyambulance » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

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 shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things

Good luck with that, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Many "non-trivial" applications got their start at someone's desk in the form of a shitty excel spreadsheet with horrific macros. Is it optimal for "complex analysis"? No, but it doesn't matter because most things are computationally simple. The hard part is the intricate business logic and the timeliness of getting results and these things are not "trivial" at all.

Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should be providing alternatives. And no, engaging a software team/consultant for a million dollars to develop bespoke applications or interfaces to enterprise systems for every little project isn't a viable solution for people who need to get stuff done pronto.

A real alternative to Excel is no small feat.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#72

Post by mulmen » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:53 PM UTC

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #46

adekok wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Preferences have become a pretty natural part of using a computer, I'm not sure why we can't rely on users trying that when they run into problems. I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain. If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something mo…

This “change the settings” argument comes up from the Excelistas every time valid criticism is leveled at the tool. Can you point to this setting? No? I didn’t think so. That’s because it doesn’t exist. You’re arguing a hypothetical from a position of ignorance.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#73

Post by GiorgioG » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #62

GiorgioG wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.

The alternative doesn't have to have a high failure rate. I was brought in to help reboot their in-house implementation of a product data management system - the core issue was they didn't have any real competency in software development (though they believed they did.) Ultimately I recommended they abandon the in-house effort and instead proposed using an off-the-shelf PDM system, we evaluated quite a few decent options over the course of six months and found several that met the business's requirements. It would have been the right thing to do and I believe it would have been successful. Culturally the IT department staff was plagued with not-invented-here syndrome. It was a generally dysfunctional IT group and it's quite likely that Excel got it's start as the system of record because the business needed to get the job done, and the IT department was unable or unwilling to deliver.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#74

Post by 0x445442 » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

anakic wrote: post #53

microcolonel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…

I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may. I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation. The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are: - process (live) data…

Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps.

My first heavy use of Excel was in a thermodynamics class in college. We modeled heat gradients for various HVAC systems with Excel. After that, I used it to calculate stresses and strains of different structures using each cell as a node in finite element analysis model.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#75

Post by oblio » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #62

GiorgioG wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

On top of what you're saying, the alternative is frequently a heap of under specified, under tested (and only manually tested!), copy-pasted and shoddy quality Cobol/Java/Oracle/C#/SQLServer/PHP/MySQL code.

Yes, the performance will generally be better (1 minute to run a report, not 1 hour), but I'm not sure things will generally be better. As you said, the business people can at least modify the Excel. These systems? Not so much, without an usually massive support contract (Yaaaay! for us IT people, I guess).

People sometimes make a false equivalent and imagine that the Excel jungle will be replaced by a Google-developed, 90%+ unit tested, refactored and cleaned periodically bunch of code.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#76

Post by justthisguy » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

Sounds like misuse of excel rather than don't use it.. no mention of powerpivot , query tool or connections. also there is much more to consider when switching to a cloud solution.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#77

Post by vollmond » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #43

piaste wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?

Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.

Is there a github or similar I can watch?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#78

Post by tpeo » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

jimworm wrote: post #24

"Stop using paper", says chief of a company that treats modified copies as if they were originals, "if we all carved our work on to this big stone in the middle of the courtyard then we'd be rid of our paper problems".

"Wall Street is investing into the new pyramids. Here is why."

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#79

Post by crispyambulance » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

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.

This!

I happen to use and advocate for R/RStudio for ad-hoc work (I spin it as "excel on steroids" when I am trying to convince someone). But it is hard to pull people away from something that has worked for them.

The alternatives to excel in the past have been really, really unpleasant to use. A now EOL product from Oracle comes to mind. It is called "Discoverer"-- that's right, "Discover" + "er". It is a turgid POS requiring extreme suffering and handholding/permission granting from your local friendly DBA-- all this to produce 90's era bar charts that are all but impossible to tweak.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#80

Post by bsenftner » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

anakic wrote: post #53

microcolonel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…

I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may. I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation. The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are: - process (live) data…

I did something like this in 2002 for a VFX house; but it was loading a DLL that hot loaded other DLLs, queried the routines and exposed them as Excel functions. Through that I pulled in a stochastic modeling framework I wrote, and pulled in 5 years of the studio's timecard records to create a production forecasting system, right down to selecting the correct staff for each position, with backup people, for 1200 digital artists. The Excel "spreadheet" was something like 250 MB when saved with a film production in it.