201–210 of 435 posts
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?
Not sure if these cloud offerings have the same breadth of features that Excel has as I've never used them, but Workviva seems to be some sort of cloud based spreadsheet and analytics tool.
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.
Can anybody think of other examples of products or tools that fall into the category of: “many people use them, even though management tells them not to, because it helps them get stuff done.” I’m not a mechanic, but is WD40 an example? Or maybe some tool like a hand held circular saw, in home construction? And, other examples from the tech world?
Trello. In the last few jobs I've had there's almost always been a developer who has their own personal to do list on a trello board, even if we had robust tracking systems like jira and rally.
Having tickets in JIRA is for the team to track and plan work that needs to be done, not for storing personal garbage.
Databases are meant for tech stacks, not working with lists.
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…
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 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)?
In general, one of the worst things about Excel is there's no obvious way to lock anything to keep it from getting changed by accident.
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…
A more accurate headline in terms of the article's contents would be something like, "Stop Using Excel For ERP, CRM, And Workflow-Based Use Cases, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs". Or to be extra snarky, "Follow Known Best Practices, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs".
Not that attention should not be paid to the article's subject matter -- there is SO MUCH wood to chop in terms of helping enterprise customers run their companies better and/or get rid of inefficiency and general jankiness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, use Google Sheets :) Centralized, single source of truth spreadsheets.
Google Sheets is great and makes sense for a lot of vanilla use cases, but even in its current form, doesn't hold a candle to Excel running on a Windows machine when it comes to doing anything even slightly fancy or non-trivial.
Also Google Sheets has an API for stuff like Python.