Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

I know Google Sheets gives you a little bit of this with Javascript embedding but I was searching for something more tightly integrated with Excel or LibreOffice.

"Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month"

"Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency values"

"As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both places"

"When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically update"

"We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have an automated job for that"

Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs, etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all works.

But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over, and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system. They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain about instead!

Yes it seems that way but many spreadsheets exist because the centralized system is an incomplete solution.

For example, a company might have a "human resources tracking" centralized system. (E.g. Ariba, Peoplesoft, etc). It has some standard features like ingesting resumes and extracting "skills" from parsing MS Word docs, etc.

However, the company happens to use a interviewing process where the candidate must pass (1) phone interview and (2) onsite with 5 peer programmers, and (3) hiring manager.

The hiring manager wants to "capture" all of those states (phone_passed=True/False, peer interviews with 5 different numerical scores, manager_pass=True/False). The centralized system doesn't have fields that capture all that so the hiring manager creates a spreadsheet that has those extra columns. Many spreadsheets out in the wild "fill the gap" between incomplete centralized systems and custom IT programming. An adhoc xls file can be created far faster than submitting a change request to the corporate IT department to customize Ariba -- which could take months (or never) to implement.

Or spreadsheets act as the "intersection" of data between multiple systems. Again, one purpose of centralized "data warehouses" was to eliminate Excel "data silos" but again, no IT department can create data warehouse solutions (which also includes all the custom reports) as fast as someone creating spreadsheets and just emailing them around.

Having a hybrid process where Excel acts as a round-trip offline client to a central db doesn't really eliminate the fundamental reason Excel (over)use keeps multiplying like rabbits.

> A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes.

Reads to me like, "last year Mr. Bell's team spent hours hammering in nails by smacking them with the wooden part of the hammer's handle"