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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#141

Post by candiodari »

jasode wrote: post #86
gaius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds. 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. Howe…

This also illustrates another problem: all the programmers here are assuming perfect domain knowledge even exists in the first place.

When it doesn't, Excel will work fine (and will only cause disaster in individual cases). A "proper" unit-tested solution will either not work at all or just won't support half the use cases.

And without someone specifying the domain knowledge, there's nothing any programmer, no matter how well-versed in unit testing, agile, or ... can do about it.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#142

Post by ProblemFactory »

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…

I have seen many of these companies and potential "build a real database-backed web app" projects during my software consulting career.

This seems like a good idea at first: automate manual processes, have a real database with one source of truth and consistency rules, multiple people can access it at the same time, etc. You can do it if the process is very well known and fixed.

But most of the time a web app would cause more hassle for the companies than having a team of people doing the work "by hand" in Excel would be.

* The process and desired data schema might change every few months - or even weekly when doing something like marketing reports. * Now they need regular maintenance - keeping servers up, doing and testing backups, applying security patches. * But the problem being solved is not big enough to justify hiring a full-time team of software developers to maintain it forever.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#143

Post by wpietri »

mabbo wrote: post #18

I 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…

I definitely agree that spreadsheets (of which Excel is just the latest) have drawn a lot of people into basic programming. But at the same time, it has stunted a lot of people's growth because of its sharp limitations.

Spreadsheets have a lot of similarities to the sort of code bases that as an industry we've been moving away from. E.g., no version control, no tests, opaque code, bugs are hard to find, write-only code, bit rot, random antique scripts used in critical spots, poor reusability, latest version is on somebody's hard drive somewhere, nobody knows which version is the right one.

I also think it's deeply unfortunate that there's no good path from spreadsheet master to real developer. As great as spreadsheets are, they're a cul de sac. I hope this new generation of tools fixes that. If not, somebody sure should.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#144

Post by rdiddly »

Pretty much every CRUD app I've ever written was to replace something that was already being done in Excel, and the reason was always to get more of one or more things a RDBMS gives you. So I can say this from a knowing place: good freaking luck replacing Excel's other capabilities. 30 years of work by thousands of Microsoft devs is not easily replaced. It's like a moat around their business that they built by brute force.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#145

Post by lukateake »

ransom1538 wrote: post #60
mabbo wrote: post #18

I 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…

You can do crazy shit in excel. After someone opens an excel sheet - download a webpage and save it to disk? no problem. Lets load other excel files in memory and run their scripts too! Don't worry about your computer fan - while we scan your disk for stuff. Just state "On Error Resume Next" and start scanning hardware. Company email accounts are stuffed with one off sketchy excel attachments. https://stackoverflow.c…

When you put it like that, ransom1538, I'm not going to click the link!

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#146

Post by jasode »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #97
jasode wrote: post #22

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 sor…

> 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". It wasn't very long ago that I realized that my two decades in IT could be summed up as: making proper applications out of Excel workbooks with feeble macros. I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux zealot, but dang if they didn't cr…

>making proper applications out of Excel workbooks

Yes, exactly.

If we're being uncharitable, we can spin Greenspun's 10th rule[1] of programming as:

>"Any sufficiently complicated Excel spreadsheet contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a proper centralized database."

Or, if we're being charitable, we frame it as an internal MVP (Minimum Viable Product):

>"Spreadsheets are the internal 'mvp' that proves the business value before you build the centralized systems. When the spreadsheet becomes unmaintable spaghetti formulas and the xls email workflow crushes under its own weight, that will give the company the evidence and the confidence to spend $1 million and migrate the spreadsheet to a proper centralized database."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#147

Post by sheetjs »

ajlburke wrote: post #104
mabbo wrote: post #18

I 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…

I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over). Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly…

> my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best:

> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657

FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries to read and write spreadsheets (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, demo http://oss.sheetjs.com/) ended up garnering lots of demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#148

Post by majkinetor »

bitwisebob wrote: post #108

While we're talking about Excel: Are there any good tools available for version control and/or diffing of spreadsheets? If my coworker updates a formula in cell E3 and emails it to be, is there any way for me to know what changed?

Excel shared workbook is versioned and comes OTB.

You can see user edits, old cell value and new one.

It gets latest data on save and even does merge

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#149

Post by sliverstorm »

mabbo wrote: post #18

I 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…

I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business.

You would have thought this would be obvious- it seems analogous to perl/python or other such Swiss army knife tools we use for quick one-off solutions that occasionally get pressed into permanent formal use where they shouldn't.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#150

Post by beezle »

This really sounds like another case of whats old is new again. In a way, I think it speaks a bit to the obsolecence of what used to be 'systems professionals' that things have swung so far into the end user domain.

If the finance team (and I have been part of one early in my career at a major conglomerate) is doing essentially the same repetitive analysis on periodic data sets, it is their bad for not reaching out to their systems people for a better way. Those types of reporting can be canned at a much earlier level and output generated/delivered in the desired format directly to the end users. And nothing precludes still making data available for new types of analysis.

Excel is great for small operations, ad hoc stuff and just quick and dirty work (a REPL of sorts as others have said). But not as a primary/crucial reporting tool for large operations.

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