Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
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Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#2Matt Parker's "When Spreadsheets Attack" video about EUSpRig
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#3Love this. Glad to know there is a whole established group of other spreadsheet nerds out there!
I made BudgetSheet ( https://budgetsheet.net ) for myself and others who love to work in their own spreadsheets!
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#4I work at a large firm which has shifted itself from using Excel, to significantly promoting data analytics tools such as Alteryx in place of Excel.
One of the MAJOR improvements from using Alteryx is that it is easier to audit and review the process. With Excel you can be down the rabbit hole of data manipulation or formula driven outputs and realise you have made a mistake but cannot find where or how. Or cannot find where you went wrong without recreating the steps followed. The workflow style interface of Alteryx and other data analytics tools allows everyone to see the process from start to finish of how you are getting to your outputs. It can also ingest and handle much larger datasets than default Excel.
I honestly believe that we will see a large shift from using Excel to using better suited analytics tools. I cannot think of anything I can do in Excel that I can do in a GUI based data analytics tool. Not to write Excel off completely as will certainly still be using it, but to a lesser extent and not where complex data manipulation is required.
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#5The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EUSpRig) runs an annual conference [...] — and there’s also a Yahoo Groups mailing list, where members offer tips and tricks, share links to resources and pick apart press coverage of the contact tracing debacle
When Yahoo Groups shuts down, no more excel repair for governments?
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#6Excel took a step in the right direction when it introduced tables, which autofill formulas for all its rows (seriously, use them!), but it should've made deviations more obvious in them. Right now it's the usual green corner, which is extremely easy to miss in a large data set. This, and explicit column types would prevent maybe 80% of spreadsheet errors.
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#7Excel took a step in the right direction when it introduced tables, which autofill formulas for all its rows (seriously, use them!), but it should've made deviations more obvious in them. Right now it's the usual green corner, which is extremely easy to miss in a large data set. This, and explicit column types would prevent maybe 80% of spreadsheet errors.
You know, for all of the rebellion over windows telemetry they probably do have the metrics somewhere to find out if your correct.
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#8I work at a large firm which has shifted itself from using Excel, to significantly promoting data analytics tools such as Alteryx in place of Excel. One of the MAJOR improvements from using Alteryx is that it is easier to audit and review the process. With Excel you can be down the rabbit hole of data manipulation or formula driven outputs and realise you have made a mistake but cannot find where or how. Or cannot fi…
The problem is that everyone has and knows how to use excel. And enough people in finance and consulting see excel skills as a mark of status that there's going to be some resistance to change there. A new tool has to be equally universal, easy to use for basic purposes while having advanced capabilities, etc. There are courses that teach supply chain management with solver and the like - having people shift over from the only software they were trained to use is not trivial. It was easier for geneticists to change gene names than change excel behavior in the end for a reason - excel is powerful and everywhere
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#9I work at a large firm which has shifted itself from using Excel, to significantly promoting data analytics tools such as Alteryx in place of Excel. One of the MAJOR improvements from using Alteryx is that it is easier to audit and review the process. With Excel you can be down the rabbit hole of data manipulation or formula driven outputs and realise you have made a mistake but cannot find where or how. Or cannot fi…
Alteryx appears to be considerably more expensive, though. Shouldn’t it take a tool of comparable cost to replace Excel? Especially in self-serve use.
I’m not disputing the quality of the tool, to be clear. It seems like a good change and a totally reasonable line item. Just questioning what it will take to actually replace Excel in a widespread way.
Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
#10I work at a large firm which has shifted itself from using Excel, to significantly promoting data analytics tools such as Alteryx in place of Excel. One of the MAJOR improvements from using Alteryx is that it is easier to audit and review the process. With Excel you can be down the rabbit hole of data manipulation or formula driven outputs and realise you have made a mistake but cannot find where or how. Or cannot fi…
Also, Excel is just buggy enough to screw you over anyway, even if you’re trying to use it safely. I can’t count how many times valid formulas have failed on me across various instances of spreadsheets. Or I have to save, reload, or restart just to make things work. I’m constantly amazed by how much it’s used for business critical functions while being so routinely unreliable.