81–90 of 193 posts
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>Excel suffers from being accessible to "everyone", and having a low barrier of entry. I call this "baby with a nailgun syndrome". You end up with a bloody mess.
Love it. I'm in Excel ~50+ hours / week and will definitely start using this sentence
Excel suffers from being accessible to "everyone", and having a low barrier of entry. While I'm not an auditor, I've been the go-to Excel person at all my internships and in full time roles. I've reviewed, enhanced, and fixed hundreds for tons of different functions (HR, supply chain, manufacturing production reporting). You can build a respectable system in Excel which has built in error flags that make it obvious t…
> * Lock sheets, even without a password. 90% of the time will prevent people from breaking the spreadsheet in the first case. Is there any way to lock all cells in sheet except for certain input cells? That seems like it would prevent many errors.
Example: a lookup list for “hardware models” which is protected. So you can’t add a new model, but some cretin forces you to keep using the sheet.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…
Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…
Excel is the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail. It is very flexible, powerful and beginner-friendly. And while you can solve a lot of problems with it, some of those should be handled by other programs (or other people). The problem is that the average Excel user doesn't have the right knowledge to judge what the best solution is to their problem. And sometimes it only becomes clear after long…
This is so frustrating because I've worked in small departments in an international company. Our problems were too small to get consistent, needed help from IT and we weren't important enough to get one of the limited licenses to the fancy reporting system.
Ultimately, there's all this bad talk about evil Excel, but we get no help or other resources.
And what about all the junk reports that were coming out of the company database that no one wanted to spend the money to fix?
THE ONLY VIABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS EXCEL.
Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…
Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…
To me it seems Python or Julia notebook stuff like ipython or jupyter could (and did in some circles) displace Excel in almost all cases. The self-sustained inertia to change is real though.
Get into the world of the Excel user. Some of us do learn coding. But generally speaking? No. If it happens, it's on our own.
And we can agree that spreadsheets have problems, and Excel users typically are not data people.
BUT!
When we agree on that, it becomes evident that a lot of suggested solutions are non-starters. Not all Excel users are in an enterprise that's throwing money around for training and dedicated software.
I'd like to see the Warehouse Manager who goes in Monday morning and says to the company vice-president, "I've been looking into this Python class ... "
Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…
I used to professionally audit spreadsheets that were used to back up million dollar decisions. I say “back up” because it was fairly clear the decisions were made independently. But they needed to tick a box saying they’d had it audited so they paid us for a two day audit. In that limited time, which included writing the report, you’ll appreciate we rarely had time to audit anything more than the top-level summary s…
If you work with Excel with any regularity at all, it's immediately 100% clear that this is a Date issue. I can't emphasize enough how obvious and elementary this "mystery" is.
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My own Easy Data Transform software ( https://www.easydatatransform.com ) does a fair amount of what Alteryx does and is just $99 (one time fee). So cheaper than Excel!
How is this better than power query? I know this has a visulaization of the transformations, but that's on the roadmap for PQ.