481–490 of 834 posts
> As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.
Why would they even use XLS in the first place? CSV files have no such limitation, you can have CSV files that hold billions of records.
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Umm, who is qualified to write programs in any programming language, if both programmers and developers frequently have errors in their code? https://cve.mitre.org/cve/
That exactly right, noone is. Thats why noone uses C++ or javascript in safety critical devices Even in 'normal' industry its is a huge problem and we need safer languages, i.e. Rust (merits to be seen)
Ooh, no that's fairly incorrect. Javascript for sure is less common because it's the web browser language, but C and C++ are used all the time in embedded safety critical designs.
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I've re-read the parent comment a few times, and I really don't see how this is your takeaway. The author is complaining that they find Excel difficult to inspect and different spreadsheets difficult to compare. There's no claim that Excel did a calculation wrong.
> The author is complaining that they find [insert-least-favorite-programming-language] difficult to inspect and different [programs] difficult to compare. There's no claim that [least-favorite-programming-language] did a calculation wrong.
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Okay, so you write a script to take the data from your internal server and post it somewhere that Excel can access. You don't use Yahoo.
How about don't use excel in the first place?
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Doesn't Excel by default capture the .csv extension so that it gets called automatically when you try to open the file? Since Excel is one of the few standard pieces of software that knows how to open CSV, it gets used a lot of times when it shouldn't. There's another post I made comparing Excel to a swiss army knife, and there's a reason for that.
I don't know many engineers - even in the data team - with an Office license.
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Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.
CSV != Excel. I work CSVs regularly and can't recall the last time I opened up Excel (intentionally)
I hate solving problems and not knowing how I did it, so this particular experience has stuck in my craw. Trying to develop a budget to pay off debts, my partner made this elaborate Excel spreadsheet and the output was that basically she had no spending money and I had very little, until one or both of us got a raise. It was far more austere than either of us were willing to go. So I started over using a different eq…
Your post is so stupid that someone could make a copy-pasta of it, e.g. "I tried to write a program in C++ but it didn't want to compile, so I spent 90 minutes poking at the code, looking for the error and never did find it. I don't know what the right solution is to this sort of problem, at least for developers. ------------------- "I don't know how to use Excel (most popular spreadsheet program used for budgeting),…
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That would imply non-tech people having some surprisingly deep visibility into technical details. What they really see is Excel vs. some contractor doing "a system". The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentica…
Excel never works for math, at any scale. It's a constant trashfire of "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats. Excel is nice for visualizing and browsing data you already have, and informally searching and sorting for hypothesis generation.
Excel is great in my industry (slot machine game/math design). It is fantastic for doing game calculations and there are reasonable ways to do error handling/checking for correctness.
I could say the same about programming a web app without writing tests/spending some time on system architecture. It looks fine until it doesn’t work.
In both instances of development (I argue constructing an Excel workbook in my line of work is very similar to programming) there are ways to mitigate risks by doing things similar to “writing tests”.