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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#221

Post by mschuster91 »

This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever.

In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority) usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever... especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel without any due diligence, the staff looks at the software and decides it's crap and continues to use Excel => CFO gets mad because no one uses the expensive software.

If you don't believe me, just ask yourselves how Oracle, IBM and Accidenture are still in business despite numerous highly expensive and publicized failures. It's all due to CxO pampering (in addition to a bit of vendor lock in).

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#222

Post by ComodoHacker »

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…

>that will give the company the evidence and the confidence to spend $1 million and migrate the spreadsheet to a proper centralized database

...along with understanding that migrating at earlier stage would cost only $100K.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#223

Post by dalbasal »

osullivj wrote: post #199
dalbasal wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also because Excel is both an IDE for developing spreadsheets, and a GUI container for operating them. Splitting dev time and run time environments would help with control. When a dev supplies a user with a traditional .Net GUI app, they don't enable the user to hack the app by supplying a copy of VisualStudio alongside. Effectively, this is what Excel does.

Yes, but.

It's no good if you fix excel by making it not excel. The whole reason excel is so popular is the intuitive, unintimidating but terribly wrong way it mixes data, code and GUI. Functions in the data, constants repeated in every row, hard coded variables all over the place. If you're just supplying a GUI and hiding the code, the user can't change, add or debug anymore. The point is that they can code, even if they don't know they are coding.

The trick is to think up a way of shipping VisualStudio, but making it less terrifying to engineers, managers and such.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#224

Post by newbear »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #198
euyyn wrote: post #179

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.

Example of fancy or non-trivial?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#225

Post by 1_2__4 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #221

This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever. In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority) usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever... especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel without any due diligence, the staff looks at…

This 1000%. The companies you mentioned don’t innovate on tech, they innovate on sucking up to executives and convincing them to buy things that the executive’s own staff recommends against. They have extraordinarily well-oiled sales machinery that deftly bypasses any kind of sanity checking inside the customer’s company and devote all their efforts to keeping it running.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#226

Post by c3534l »

Accountants invented spreadsheets. Programmers made electronic spreadsheet programs. The reason why spreadsheets are so popular among otherwise not technically people is because it was developed by business people over the course of centuries.

Unfortunately, if you're not technically inclined and someone gives you a big hammer, at a certain point you're gonna have to stop hammering everything you encounter and learn how to use a screwdriver.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#228

Post by sidcool »

mschuster91 wrote: post #221

This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever. In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority) usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever... especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel without any due diligence, the staff looks at…

What's Accidenture?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#229

Post by sandGorgon »

After building a couple of years of financial systems, I have a hypothesis - if you could build a Jupyter Notebook with an editable spreadsheet view that is backed by a database and has something like Atom editor Teletype's CRDT (conflict free replicated data types) to enable collaboration...that would be an Excel killer.

Incidentally, there are a lot of people who move from Excel to Salesforce ! Because of the ability to program it like an Excel sheet.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#230

Post by Nicholas_C »

ryandrake wrote: post #98
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…

Don't forget the all-to-common scenario: "Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint." So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in…

I used to work as a corporate financial planning analyst and this hit way too close to home.

Then one executive who didn’t like the story would have one of his analysts pull the same data in a slightly different way and adjust it. The executive would then show it to the CFO and tell him that’s the real story. The CFO would turn to you and ask why his number is different than yours. Then you would spend hours with the analyst reconciling the data and building a waterfall chart to send to the CFO to explain the difference.

Then if you’re really unlucky the CFO says he wants to see the data both ways with a waterfall reconciliation every month.

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