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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

#171

Post by kazagistar »

sliverstorm wrote: post #149
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.

Python (and probably Perl too) work fine for permanent formal use as long as they are engineered as such. I have seen clear, well structured permanent code bases in python. The problem is just that people like coding one off prototypes in python, and those end up in prod; it's just as bad as when Java prototypes end up in prod, but who actually wants to write prototypes in Java, if given the choice?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#172

Post by jpindar »

Sean1708 wrote: post #163
oblio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the business people can at least modify the Excel I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If they can change the Excel then they can also fuck up the system, and if you fuck up a system like this then it's horrendously difficult to unfuck. I think systems like this look great when they're working, but the second they go tits up you realise why people are horrified by them.

Especially since the people who do this generally don't use version control.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#173

Post by fjsolwmv »

jasode wrote: post #146
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #97

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…

A database is not a spreadsheet replacement. A database backed application is a spreadsheet replacement.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#174

Post by Robotbeat »

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…

Completely agree.

It's common to tell kids (and everyone) that they need to "learn to code." That is what Excel already is! And it's incredibly powerful, especially if you don't have any other coding skills.

But, of course, it's messy. When tens of millions of people can each write their own programs and easily modify them and change them to suit their own needs without needing to recompile or anything, then you get the mess which is Excel.

...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!).

But that's fine. Give humans tools, and they'll find clever ways of using them that you don't intend. And it'll continue to drive people crazy. In some ways, the Excel hate (though obviously not unfounded) seems almost kind of like a bourgeoisie elitism. THIS is what it looks like when you give everyone the ability to code!

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#175

Post by tolger »

There are things that Excel is good for and some that it's not. This article seems like it's blaming the tool instead of the people who are using it incorrectly.

Also I laughed when one of the complaints was "Older versions of Excel don't allow multiple users to collaborate on the same document". Well, is that Excel's fault, or should they just go and get the latest version?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#176

Post by Amezarak »

fragsworth wrote: post #164
roadnottaken wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing something, this only provides a way to display data from a database. But users cannot write to the database via the Google Sheet, and it thus doesn't solve the problem...

Oh god you're right, I just re-read the article and realized what they're doing now. It didn't even occur to me that anyone would use Excel as the database . Holy hell. Nevermind. Still, it shouldn't be hard to convert Excel to an SQL database. Then you dump to CSV, and use ImportHTML to have a spreadsheet be your source of information.

Excel can use databases as a data source, there's no need for all your extra steps.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#177

Post by DougWebb »

Robotbeat wrote: post #174
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…

Completely agree. It's common to tell kids (and everyone) that they need to "learn to code." That is what Excel already is! And it's incredibly powerful, especially if you don't have any other coding skills. But, of course, it's messy. When tens of millions of people can each write their own programs and easily modify them and change them to suit their own needs without needing to recompile or anything, then you get…

...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!).

That's exactly what happened with Perl when everyone learned to use, modify, and develop CGI scripts in the early days of web-based application development. Dynamically-generated website content worked and evolved into the web we know today, but those scripts were awful and did a lot of harm to Perl's reputation.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#178

Post by enraged_camel »

baxtr wrote: post #10

I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons - excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc - speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying - analysis: It's ea…

Actually, the main reason is that SAP is expensive as hell. The starter package is $1400 per user (one time) or $410 per user per year. And that's just the software. Add consulting services that are always necessary to actually make it fit your organization and you're easily looking at millions of dollars in capital spend.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#179

Post by euyyn »

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…

Alternatively, use Google Sheets :) Centralized, single source of truth spreadsheets.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#180

Post by adekok »

crispyambulance wrote: post #71
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 ti…

> Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should be providing alternatives.

Yeah... like I'm going to compete with MS by writing my own Excel replacement. That just isn't realistic.

What would be realistic is for MS to acknowledge that a large proportion of their customers use Excel for a particular purpose. And then tailor their software to the needs of their customer base.

But why would MS care? The researchers already bought Excel. So why "fix" it?

On top of that, no one is aware the the published papers are crap.

The real solution would be for journals to deny publication of papers based on shitty Excel analysis.

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