Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#261

Post by microcolonel » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

anakic wrote: post #53

microcolonel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…

I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may. I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation. The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are: - process (live) data…

Yes, I saw your tool before. I recommended it to somebody a couple months ago and they're very happy with it for their use case.

It is brave of you to integrate directly with Excel, and I commend you for that. Maybe some day I will work up the courage to do something other than basic one-way import.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#262

Post by microcolonel » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

vollmond wrote: post #77

microcolonel wrote: post #43

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.

Is there a github or similar I can watch?

After seeing the level of interest here, I set up a (tentative) github org where I'll put the repo for the evaluator when it has some reasonable subset of the desired functionality.

https://github.com/exorgan

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#263

Post by 8ytecoder » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:37 PM UTC

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…

Excel totally totally missed the wonderful opportunity to do so much better than Google Spreadsheets. They could have created a centralized shared way of creating, editing, sharing and storing data. Their limitations as it exists today are ludicrous at best - 10 max users? Give companies a way to keep the data in a centrally managed place with access control and auditing and users the ability to freely share their creations (and data)...

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#264

Post by laythea » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

ajlburke wrote: post #104

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 used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over). Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly…

Maybe I did not appreciate it properly, but I remember using Lotus Notes at my work a few years ago, and I can remember it being the most awful piece of software I have ever used. Admittingly I am not a specialist, more an employee trying to use it to do my job.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#265

Post by sundaysailor » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:45 PM UTC

supergreg wrote: post #130

I remember one IronPython book that made a spreadsheet application that allowed the user to use python itself for the spreadsheet functions. I think it was a great idea. The software itself was available for download for a time.

There was a startup called Resolver Sytems pursuing this. They meanwhile abandoned it in favor of a different project but did open-source it: https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#266

Post by cr0sh » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:46 PM UTC

petilon wrote: post #109

gaius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities. You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.

Actually you run into the one of Excel's biggest problems when you do this, namely "Multiple versions of the truth". Here's how that happens: The central database often contains bad data. Users "fix" the bad data in their spreadsheet. Excel doesn't have the ability to write the updated data back to the database. Now everyone has their own versions of "the truth". There are products that attempt to solve this problem…

> There are products that attempt to solve this problem by adding the ability to write modified data back to the database.

Another company/product that I know about (though it's been over a decade since I last touched it) that attempted to fix this issue was Actuate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuate_Corporation

Hmm - and now that I've started digging into it, I see that this company has radically changed from what I knew of it. I had known it as a company which created software for designing and running reports from various data sources (whatever could feed it, honestly - excel, odbc, csv files, etc), which internally could be configured for more advanced usage using a language that had similarities to Visual Basic (it was OO long before VB, and geared for the reporting system, not general purpose usage). Before I left my employer who used it, they had just announced a Java-based system of "business objects" and some kind of tool to interact with data in an Excel-like manner (the tool essentially had all of the functionality of Excel at the time - including pivot tables), where changes would propagate thru the system. Plus interaction could only be done thru those objects, which were defined as "views" into the dataset.

So - after research this (just now!) - imagine my surprise at finding that this company now is named:

https://www.opentext.com/

...and they also did something called "BIRT" - which was open source and part of Eclipse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project

Apparently this started in 2004 (not long after I left my employer - and that it is Java-based also fits).

I'm not sure what is what with the company any longer? If I had to guess (probably wrongly), they spun off their Actuate reporting stuff and the other tools as open source (?), and are now concentrating on other things, possibly in the same vein?

Weird. But very interesting.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#267

Post by lolmaxos » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

R_haterade wrote: post #134

Gustomaximus wrote: post #5

The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.

>its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting. You wanna know what's even more useful? Code notebooks. I store everything from my sql queries to my processing pipeline to my models, and my vizualizations. Most notebooks have slide-show modes now so your presentation to business stakeholders is simple to prepare as well, and with the right plotting packages you can draw interactive charts that do all…

Oh yes. I have tried to introduce jupyter notebooks with pandas to data analysts so many times, but they always want to do it in excel.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#268

Post by jstarfish » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #177

Robotbeat wrote: post #174

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…

PHP always got heat for the same reasons (so much terrible, amateur advice replicating via StackOverflow et al.), and the only thing keeping Python from meeting the same fate is the fact that shoddy scripts written in Python generally don't get deployed to a public-facing platform for the world to abuse.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#269

Post by njharman » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

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.

Users able to modify cod is the opensource model. It doesn't lose its benefits and advantages just because the users are not us(professional devs)

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#270

Post by muxator » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 7:12 PM UTC

I used to joke with my colleagues that you never have to write "Excel" in your CV :)

Now that I am grown up a bit, I recognize it can be useful. The real life problem, for me, is recognizing when comes the moment to stop sending spreadsheets by mail and write software, instead.

Or buy it. Lots of people buy sofware, they tell me. Why don't they feel the pleasure of crafting every single bit by themselves?