191–200 of 435 posts
I have produced thousands of reports in excel format in the financial services industry. If there were an easier api to just have an excel sheet pull/push data from/to a web service, this would be the best of both worlds. The interface is very familiar for many professionals, its just a matter of coordinating and working off a the same data.
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’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…
I use Excel because my boss wants to use Excel, because all his bosses have wanted to use Excel, because all their previous bosses have wanted to use Excel.
That's how it works in the electronics manufacturing industry, anyway.
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Every email reply becomes an independent fork of the data inside the spreadsheet. The issue is storing and sending the file locally, and the solution is storing it in a centralized location. Cloud storage is often used towards this end, but on-premises file shares work very well too. This is one of those solved problems that companies inexplicably keep working to solve again.
It's such a bizarrely difficult uphill battle. We have Office 365, with a damned good web editor, and the ability to save directly to OneDrive/Sharepoint from the desktop client, with the versioning that that supports, and we still end up with shit emailed all over and files with version-12.xlsx and -$DATE.xlsx saved here, there, and everywhere.
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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…
Unfortunately, many businesses then find they have no way to know the extent of the data lost or who did it. And there’s no proper backups. Happens over and over thoughout the world.
Excel’s a great tool and there are lots of terrific uses for it. But what the article describes isn’t one of them. If we’re being honest, this isn’t the first time the issue’s been discussed and the companies likely aren’t actually switching away from excel, but rather supplementing it.
In fact, the article seems to be more a “hit job” / “marketing piece” for Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc. and Adaptive Insights.
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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…
Make it easy to interoperate with databases and/or revision control painlessly for the end user and the developer. The users are fine with excel, it's the attendant issues like centralizing data, running automated services off of the data, backing it up, and keeping an audit trail that created pain when I worked in healthcare.
But..I do think that if we're thinking in terms of "users" and "developers" then we're no longer talking about excel. The whole reason excel is used this way is the continuous spectrum of sophistication.
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.
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Make it easy to interoperate with databases and/or revision control painlessly for the end user and the developer. The users are fine with excel, it's the attendant issues like centralizing data, running automated services off of the data, backing it up, and keeping an audit trail that created pain when I worked in healthcare.
If excel online was better, a lot of that would be pretty doable.good points. But..I do think that if we're thinking in terms of "users" and "developers" then we're no longer talking about excel. The whole reason excel is used this way is the continuous spectrum of sophistication.
> 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. Then I believe it should say stop abusing Excel. Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate…
Edit: I just noticed that I'm the third person to reply to you and we all referenced hammers.