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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#421

Post by thanatropism »

eru wrote: post #420
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…

Compare "Improving the world’s most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...

UDFs are the real LPT. Much of gnarly spreadsheeting going around has to do with having to simulate loops with rows or just partition very large formulas (think option pricing formulas) into partial result cells.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#422

Post by eru »

thanatropism wrote: post #421
eru wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare "Improving the world’s most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...

UDFs are the real LPT. Much of gnarly spreadsheeting going around has to do with having to simulate loops with rows or just partition very large formulas (think option pricing formulas) into partial result cells.

Could you explain your first sentence? The acronyms are a bit dense.

Edit: UDF is user defined functions. What's LPT?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#423

Post by eru »

sheetjs wrote: post #293
jstandard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Excel is an incredible swiss army knife when dealing with one person in one location on one computer, but the warts start showing up when any of those assumptions break. One computer: once you decide you want to use your smartphone, for all but the most basic sheets there are problems with Excel mobile preview, even with Microsoft's official apps. One location: Excel's lack of a universal time (showing different time…

Add another 'one': one point in time.

What I mean is that Excel is essentially a write-only language. It's very quick to prototype something for a semi-technical person, but auditing / code-reviewing an Excel sheet later is essentially impossible. The ubiquitous manual loop unrolling doesn't help readability either.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#424

Post by eru »

anigbrowl wrote: post #305
ajlburke wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What would you use now if you needed the same sort of functionality? I find myself with some unexpected needs to build databases whose specifications and scope I'm still trying to figure out, and for now I'm missing about in Google sheets and figuring Fusion tables will probably be sufficient, but I'd be interested in any alternatives as long as they're secure and shareable.

Some combination of things like Python and SQLite would probably go a long way?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#425

Post by eru »

ggg9990 wrote: post #300
sheetjs wrote: post #147

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…

A nice quote but getting data between SaaS apps is much harder than between Excel sheets, and modifying a SaaS app with that one little thing you need for your particular case is of course impossible.

One can see parallels between Excel and Unix command line scripting here.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#426

Post by allenz »

rbg246 wrote: post #417
allenz wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I validate account totals against the balance reported by the bank.

Oh I see so you are only reporting on cash receipts, so presumably there is an accounts receivable ledger to track the invoices raised with your cash received etc. Thanks for the reply

Yup, I use cash accounting because our medical AR numbers are mostly made-up. They're tracked and analyzed through a medical billing program.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#428

Post by iagovar »

bthallplz wrote: post #189
iagovar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO if you really want non-tech users to become more technical and use DBs as single source of truth, use KNIME. It still needs proper reporting addons though, but you can export data, even to tableau.

I saw a presentation about KNIME but was unfamiliar with many of the processes that it allows one to string together to build a workflow, so the notion of building a workflow myself seemed very daunting. Do you think it would allow one to build workflows for basic stuff and gradually grow in their confidence with it? The presentation mentioned that the company is/was working on reporting add-ons, I think.

Oh yeah, I'm pretty dumb and I managed to do very complicated stuff. It seems a bit tricky to "get" at the beginning, but it's pretty easy.

The trick is to learn what node does what, because there are lots of them. You can also download community nodes for additional behaviors. Once you learn the basics, it's pretty straightforward.

I learnt by trial and error, looking for examples and info about nodes, and now I have some workflows with data from DBs, files, APIs and all at once.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#430

Post by k3a »

Paid advertising? I use LibreOffice and it fullfills all my needs.

I understand, there may ve different needs in big corporations, of course. But that doesn't mean "everyone should stop using Excel and buy our cloud SW", sigh.

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