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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

#121

Post by pythonaut_16 »

submeta wrote: post #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 sea…

Do you have any suggestions on where to get started with Pandas? I already know Python, but every time I try to get into Pandas I have a really hard time getting any traction. I'm particularly interested in using it to migrate Excel workflows.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#122

Post by gech »

adekok wrote: post #29
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Interesting little article. I just read about Jeff Bezos initiative to push for all departments at Amazon to be accessible as service interfaces. Could there be real interdisciplinary growth by having academic fields concepts and data accessible in the same way? Maybe starting with papers. But then if every model developed was some kind of living running service in the cloud or hosted on .edu you could query or interact with

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#123

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #75
dalbasal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#124

Post by gech »

sullivanmatt wrote: post #111
chatmasta wrote: post #8

How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?

I work for one of the companies mentioned, and we don't / did not pay for the name drop. Maybe one of the others did, but we did not.

Is there the usual kind of database on the backend for your system?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#125

Post by pythonaut_16 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #67

It 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 :)

I've thought about this before. Does it mean that our libraries aren't good enough? Do we just not know how to use them?

I often wish there was an intermediate between writing a fully custom piece of software for something and using excel. This about how many times you've worked on a web service (or other technology) and how much of the code is basically identical to every other webservice in that technology minus some unique data models and a few functions of custom logic.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#127

Post by fiatjaf »

drinchev wrote: post #38
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…

The startup I'm working with right now is building a tool that allows you to create spreadsheet-based business applications. What I like to call the product is "excel on steroids". You can check it at www.ninoxdb.de.

This seems like an alternative to Airtable and Fieldbook. Am I wrong?

I know these tools and I like them, but this wasn't what I was talking about in my comment. I meant something more flexible and more arbitrary, like a key-value store non-tech people could edit.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#128

Post by otakucode »

This is everywhere. This is the reason I say that every company and organization, whether they realize it or not, needs software engineers. The things that grow (and they do grow rather than being built) in the absence of access to software engineers are overly complex and fragile.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#129

Post by walterbell »

flarg wrote: post #59
walterbell wrote: post #48

Earlier 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

It’s a good foundation for future open-source development, uses wxWidgets toolkit for cross-platform desktops. Author has graphics background, now busy at BigCo.
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