151–160 of 435 posts
The interface is very familiar for many professionals, its just a matter of coordinating and working off a the same data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 i…
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…
Version control for excel is terrible at best. Code review is basically non-existent and how could it be when logic is split over several cells and variables are named $A17 or B23.
I think the win with excel is its super simple interface, that said there is plenty of room to improve on the programming language interface.
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…
That's why the principal way you sell centralized systems to users isn't in the ease of manipulating results but in the ease / automation of data entry. The whole pain point and problem with Excel is in manual data entry, and having a single source of truth, even if you succeed in enforcing its property as a single source of truth, does not automatically solve disagreements between different human sources of data.
That's why tools like Grafana have interesting futures for business users, because they enforce a clear separation between data sources and data visualization, while offering a lot of control to the end user over statistical manipulations and visualizations that they can create, and keeping those visualizations updated in real time, so that they don't have to be re-prepared every time period for some new report.
You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML function. It populates your spreadsheet automatically, and then you can show graphs and other various things. And it will update on its own!
There you have it! Single source of truth! And you still get to use a spreadsheet!
It's a fucking beautiful, elegant solution to the entire "Excel problem" that I don't see enough people using.
Instead they're going with enterprise 3rd party "solutions", like Anaplan. Who knows how much money they're blowing because the execs don't know tech...
I use IntelliJ and Git, so you know what I'm missing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually you run into the one of Excel's biggest problems when you do this, namely "Multiple versions of the truth". Here's how that happens: The central database often contains bad data. Users "fix" the bad data in their spreadsheet. Excel doesn't have the ability to write the updated data back to the database. Now everyone has their own versions of "the truth". There are products that attempt to solve this problem…
My first question was going to follow the poster above, and you answered it for me. I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it? Aside from that — what about MS cloud services? I mean, maybe that's not appropriate for healthcare or certain businesses, but for others it allows there to be a single source of truth if the workflo…
Well, more accurately, it can write back to the database, but normal usage of Excel won't afford that result. Normal usage of Excel you have an independent value.
It is also a dubious proposition as to whether we want people to actually write back to the central database; you'd be one stray macro away from disaster. You sorta want it if someone manually corrects something, but not if they operate on it programmatically, and now we're making things really complicated.
Just something I discovered recently that entirely takes care of the problem if you have ONE PERSON who knows how to code: Google Sheets with the IMPORTHTML() function. You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML function. It populat…
Just something I discovered recently that entirely takes care of the problem if you have ONE PERSON who knows how to code: Google Sheets with the IMPORTHTML() function. You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML function. It populat…