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Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

wired.co.uk

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Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#101

Post by iagovar »

OzCrimson wrote: post #80

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…

Knime. Desktop app is free, is not as polished as alteryx but with some community love it will improve massively. It already is WAY better than Excel.

Stuff is organized in a manner someone unfamiliar with data handling or programming can understand it.

It takes a little bit to master, an some stuff (like looks and variable passing) is still unintuitive.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#102

Post by fauigerzigerk »

OzCrimson wrote: post #84
ssdspoimdsjvv wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again. What's the comparable alternative? 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 ju…

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts.

One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#103

Post by n4r9 »

OzCrimson wrote: post #80

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…

Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#105

Post by Aeolun »

rjtavares wrote: post #97
OzCrimson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay to train a Customer Service Rep, Admin Assistant, Sales Assistant or Warehouse Manager to do Python when there's Excel? 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…

The problem isn't businesses using Excel, the problem is businesses using Excel for critical processes. The Warehouse Manager or Sales Assistant doesn't need to learn an alternative, but e.g. the Finance people should. PowerBI/Tableau for reporting and R/Python for modelling should be a thing in those worlds (even if Excel continues to be an amazing tool for entry level stuff and some quick number crunching).

> PowerBI/Tableau for reporting

In my experience these take ages to load data that is near instant on Excel. I can totally see how people prefer excel.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#106

Post by Aeolun »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #102
OzCrimson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again. What's the comparable alternative? 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 ju…

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts. One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

I think the question is what a viable alternative is if the company does not want to spend any more effort than the effort of the singular employee that wants the report.

They can do it by themselves with Excel. Can they do that with any other software?

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#107

Post by Aeolun »

OzCrimson wrote: post #93
Symbiote wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of only considering a consultant, the company should have a developer on staff to work on small tasks like this. The cost gradually decreases as they learn the business and don't need everything explained from scratch.

See. You've got answers to something that you haven't asked a single question about. But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions. Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it…

I think the company would quickly realize that they need a different solution if they have no Excel wizard on staff, and the team spends weeks just calculating sales commissions.

Or maybe not, and they’d just hire more people solely to calculate commission :/

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#108

Post by smcl »

listenallyall wrote: post #89

Give me a break. 2nd sentence of the article: "It had the number 40,335 in a random box, and payroll wasn’t clear why it was there." 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.

I don’t use excel - could you explain what date this and why it’s obvious?

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#109

Post by jasode »

n4r9 wrote: post #103
OzCrimson wrote: post #80

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…

Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

>, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

This Libre Office question&answer[1] in 2020 says it guesses that the users want leading zeros removed from numbers. This behavior is similar to other software tools I looked at.[2]

This means that if a csv has "02142021" as a date for Valentine's Day with a leading zero, it will be imported as number "2142021" -- unless one takes extra steps to prevent the default behavior.

[1] https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-imp...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#110

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Aeolun wrote: post #106
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts. One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

I think the question is what a viable alternative is if the company does not want to spend any more effort than the effort of the singular employee that wants the report. They can do it by themselves with Excel. Can they do that with any other software?

Yes, some can, but depends on the task.

Not many people would be able to do complex calculations in an RDBMS, especially if it requires joins or grouping. But many more are able to use a GUI tool to create a single database table and import some CSV data.

The recent UK disaster wouldn't have happened if the data had been imported into Access or SQLite instead of an Excel sheet.

Of course it's not a panacea. Badly designed databases can be just as error prone as Excel, but they have different error modes.

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