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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#381

Post by R_haterade »

CJKinni wrote: post #248
R_haterade wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Do you have any way you'd recommend of getting multiple users working together with code notebooks? I've messed around with Jupyter, but that's about it.

We usually just send .ipynb files around because of the stuff we do, we all usually have the same libraries.

Installing a notebook server is an option though. IBM will be happy to let you pay to have them help, or you can do it the sane way with continuum analytics.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#382

Post by R_haterade »

lolmaxos wrote: post #267
R_haterade wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

TOO. LAZY. TO. LEARN. TO. CODE.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#383

Post by princeb »

pcsanwald wrote: post #358
megy wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a great way to code, but a horrible way to decode. Every try to pick apart someone else's spreadsheet.

You could make the same argument about most programming languages. I hate to sound like I'm parroting Spolsky, but, he's right that the reason that the reason every developer ever wants to re-write the code they inherit is because it's easier to write code than it is to read it. It's obviously an exaggeration, but not by much.

the way i tell great developers from good developers is from how willing they are to dive into someone else's turd and make changes to it.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#384

Post by allenz »

screature2 wrote: post #348
allenz wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it terrifying? I am a programmer and I use csv/Excel as the single-entry financial database for a small healthcare business ($500k revenue). The accountant is fine with it. Filtering and pivot tables are a joy in Excel, and I can still run Python scripts whenever I need (mainly to auto-categorize bank transactions). Most other businesses around here use QuickBooks, which has a proper system of accounts, but th…

I'm guessing because of 1) lack of built in logging, 2) lack of change control and 2) difficult to automate testing and verification (because of it's relatively unstructured nature). Excel as the source of truth for a financial system is particularly scary to me b/c it's so easy for someone/anyone to change entries or miscalculate so it's very difficult for me to get confidence in its completeness and correctness. Co…

Logging: I just save a copy of the spreadsheet every time I make a tax filing. Do I need anything more fine-grained?

Validation: I'm confident that I can catch duplicated rows and mistyped amounts because Excel formulas verify that the sum of all transactions for each account equals the account balance, and that transfers between accounts add up to $0. Do I need anything more?

Point-in-time doesn't work because I need to keep track of info that doesn't show up in the bank statements. I run a Python script that adds pretty-prints names and adds categories, and I also manually enter check details, category adjustments, business purpose of meals and flight tickets, etc.

I don't use a proper database because to do so I'd have to give up Excel's nice features (or worse, switch back and forth between Excel and the database).

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#385

Post by pitay »

jasode wrote: post #22

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…

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 sort ascending, click "Z-A" to sort descending. Move/hide/freeze columns. If one has intermediate-to-advanced skills, one can pivot the data on multiple axis. None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities.

What about Business Intelligence products such as Hyperion? They can provide reports from a defined data model which gets data directly from the database. People can create their pivots and other transformations on the data fairly easily. Is their something that Excel offers that makes it much better than one of these Business Intelligence products in certain situations?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#386

Post by cortesoft »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #9
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.

I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organizati…

How do you even HAVE a source of truth? You email a spreadsheet to two people, and the both want to work on it... which one is the source of truth? They each have modified the original, and we want to keep both changes.

I mean, this is the problem that distributed version control was designed to solve. Emailing a spreadsheet around and calling one a source of truth doesn’t solve the simultaneous edits problem.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#387

Post by rahimnathwani »

The title is overblown. There's a push to stop using Excel as:

* the single source of truth for a set of primary data

* the mechanism by which regular (i.e. repeated) reports and analysis are conducted

But it overlooks the fact that:

* Excel has, for many years, had real-time integration to pull data from many systems (not just 'Export to Excel', but the ability to pull data via ODBC connectors). I've used this, e.g. to pull trial balances from Sage into Excel for custom, but repeated, financial reporting.

* You can't beat Excel as a prototyping tool, or for ad hoc analysis from disparate data sources (without a huge learning curve for the people we're talking about). Telling finance/accounting professionals not to use Excel is like telling designers to use D3.js instead of Illustrator. D3 might integrate better with data sources, and be easier to version control and share etc., but for a quick sketch you'll use Illustrator.

From the title, you'd assume these 'Finance Chiefs' were expecting none of their staff would even need Excel installed, after some transition period, but this isn't the case. There's always some lag between the needs you have, and the capability of more structured tools.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#388

Post by pjmlp »

anigbrowl wrote: post #309
CabSauce wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They switch to Access until they hit the data size limit of 2GB. Then they come back to IT who has to deal with the mess that you get when you allow domain experts to build databases.

Domain experts are not the best people to build databases (says a domain expert who's failing miserably at that task right now), but database experts are sort of terrible at understanding domain problems. It seems to me that many programmers don't appreciate that industry practices or regulatory requirements impose quirky requirements on domain specialists that everyone knows are far from optimal but which need to be…

> It seems to me that many programmers don't appreciate that industry practices or regulatory requirements impose quirky requirements on domain specialists that everyone knows are far from optimal but which need to be complied with anyway if the business is to turn a profit or retain its licensure.

I think only those that turn into consulting understand it properly, because they aren't confined into a cubicle coding all day long without direct feedback how the real world actually looks like.

At most there is some feedback coming from ticket management system or the product manager.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#389

Post by azernik »

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 agree - it's also really useful as a prototyping language, since its accessibility allows domain experts to really make something that suits their workflow. My current company (Parsley, www.parsleycooks.com) would have been a lot harder to do without looking at the Excel sheets that the more tech-savvy and organized chefs use for logistics work.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#390

Post by pjmlp »

chaostheory wrote: post #210
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. Like newer versions of Excel, you can use Javascript on Google Sheets now https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets It's better than Excel's VBA. Also Google Sheets has an API for stuff like Python.

Excel can cover many use cases with just with UI workflows without requiring its users to actually learn programming.

Only the very advanced users turn to VBA programming.

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