251–260 of 435 posts
"Motley of disparate accounting systems" is your problem, not Excel. Heavy Excel use/misuse by end analysts is a symptom of poor data practices, not a cause. If Excel is being used to compile and distribute complicated/big/important reports, it's extremely likely they lack better and more coherent tools and data sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue isn't that you can't program in excel the issue is that excel lacks many of the safeguards that have been built around programming in the last few years. 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 i…
> variables are named $A17 or B23. Excel lets you name tables, cell ranges, or individual cells. I have seen spreadsheets put together by people who take the time to do this, and they are remarkably readable!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications. Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best: > Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657 FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source librari…
> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built. It's a pithy quote, you'll get a very different reaction from a finance or small to med-sized business professional. Excel is the ultimate maker studio that actually lives up to the promise of "build your own mini-app". I'm not saying it can't be improved on. It's just that the core model of flexibility is so com…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
These kinds of expressions are what ultimately caused the derisive terming of Perl as "line noise". It was really unfair, to say the least, because there were plenty of ways to code in Perl and do so cleanly, with a minimal usage of regex.
Honestly, it seemed more like people were coding in regular expressions, and simply using Perl as a "run-time" wrapper for those expressions (and maybe those expressions existed first; I don't know). I'm not the greatest fan of regular expressions (to me - especially on more complex operations - it is almost like programming the tape of a Turing machine), but I do know they have their place in the world. However, because the "language" (if you will) of regex allows for an extreme number of operations and such, it almost succumbs to an "inner platform effect", allowing those with familiarity to roam free, to the detriment of future maintainers.
That said - none of this is new. If you go back to the beginning of microcomputing, you'll find the same thing happened with the various dialects of BASIC, as people self-taught themselves programming in that language, then spread the knowledge thru various means (magazines, books, and later bbs systems) - it became a horrible mess, even though it all pretty much "worked".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"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?" 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…
Desktop apps like Excel are fabulous at letting you work alone with data in front of you.
But they are a shitstorm of horror when you try to work with other people, collecting data from multiple places. And sure, Office 365 is a step in the right direction, but it's not nearly enough. Google Sheets is slightly better, but it's still not enough.
To be frank, the same way that "anyone can do SQL," we've fallen into a trap of thinking "anyone can do Excel," and it's just not true. And no amount of improving the commercial product Excel will make it work for businesses like they need, in my opinion.
At some point you need to hire engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, process engineers, business analysts, etc., to help you manage your data.
Asking people to "Learn Excel" in order to replace a real team of qualified domain experts is folly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively you misunderstood the business requirements and would have cost then a fortune on a failed project. Alternatively you were brought in by management to make cost cutting recommendations - and your solution wasn't cheap enough. Alternatively the company accounted for the enormous risk of the project succeeding but actually being worse than what they had in place. You really don't know the politics of this…
I upvoted your post because I think those alternatives are interesting to consider, but _you_ know far less about the politics of the situation than the OP. It's entirely possible that the OP was exactly correct, or close to correct. It's also quite likely that at least one of the factors you mentioned (or others) was also at play.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Nickname" for Accenture, an IT consulting/bodyshop famous for delivering stuff at waaay less than acceptable quality (or not delivering at all). In addition they're also known for exploiting their employees. See also http://exposingevilempire.com/ .
Is it different from other giant IT services firms?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful
Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.
Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ ?