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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

#141

Post by sixhobbits »

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…

Metabase (for reports rather than transformations) was useful to fill all the "cant we just have like a spreadsheet" requests while maintaining some quality

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

#142

Post by moomin »

imperfectcats wrote: post #33
moomin wrote: post #15

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…

Is your job to help the justify the justification, or to really fix things?

Neither. You report what you found. You make recommendations. You state which areas you haven't had the time to look at. Under no circumstances do you provide any guarantees that might put you at the wrong end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

This, incidentally, is every audit ever. I've been audited many times, every audit finds stuff and make recommendations. Then management gets to pick which recommendations they adopt and which they'll derogate. I'm not saying it's a completely useless process, but it doesn't provide the cast-iron guarantees people think it does.

Then, of course, there's financial audits, which are meant to provide a cast-iron guarantee the firm is still a viable entity. But nearly every big firm that went bankrupt had passed such an audit in the previous year.

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

#143

Post by moomin »

conductr wrote: post #88
moomin wrote: post #15

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…

QOE drove me nuts in a past life. M&A of small companies with crappy financial data. Biggest caveat is basically garbage in and garbage out. But often they already had the deal done and would just feel better if I told them the garbage didn’t stink.

One of my best behaviours for actually writing one of these things is to have a single page that only has inputs/assumptions on it and put an annotation/note on every last data item/series saying where you got it from, because someone on the warpath will want to know where you got that BS number from two months later, and it's very satisfying to show it was them.

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

#144

Post by Pamar »

zhte415 wrote: post #118
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.

Not just a developer. A developer that's clued up in business needs, can communicate (listen, clarify, translate technical concepts), has a smattering in finance to promote cost, time and/or quality savings they make. And the company needs a succession plan should such a person not turn up.

Like a Business Analyst, sorta?

What is the first tool a BA would reach for for most of these problems?

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

#145

Post by ksquarekumar »

iagovar wrote: post #101
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.

And how does knime/everything else compare with PowerBI, given how aggressively it is being pushed by Microsoft, and the fact that it would come bundled as part of most organizations Office 365 deployment.

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

#146

Post by Pamar »

ssdspoimdsjvv wrote: post #83
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…

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…

Your position is more reasonably explained than most of the Excel Haters' (I am a card carrying member of the group, btw) but there is an additional problem.

Even if/when the "average Excel user" finally sees the Light ... s/he still has to work in an environment where excel files (including .csv) are the lingua franca.

It's a bit like working for the German (or French or Japanese etc.) branch of a US large company. Of course the official language is English, and all documents should be written in English and emails should be in English and so on. Even if everybody (down to the Janitor?) speak acceptable English and are perfectly able to talk business in English... everyone will still use German unless they have to communicate with someone like me, whose German fluency is rated in Imaginary Numbers.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

wintorez wrote: post #44
smabie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually like Excel, and think it could be significantly better, but in general, I agree with you. Excel has allowed users with domain specific knowledge to create real honest to god software cheaply and quickly. The biggest triumph of Excel is that you can incrementally learn new things, slowly turning a basic worksheet into a Turing complete masterpiece. In contrast, I believe that programming languages hav…

I would like to argue that Excel (i.e. spreadsheets) are a form of programming language; albeit in tabular format. Each cell is a variable, some cells are constants, some cells are computed, cells can be conditional, etc. A programming language must not necessary come in form of written text. We can say that concept of spreadsheet is the programming language, and Excel, Google Sheets, etc. are just implementation of…

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by heavenlyblue »

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 would say that you probably do not know what you did wrong having done it in Excel. Stuff gets complicated really fast in Excel thus it’s much easier to do something that you can’t possibly debug and thus live in blissful ignorance.

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

#149

Post by dmaevsky »

I used Excel professionally for 20+ years as a quant in major banks. Mostly as a front end to mathematical models in C++. Always been amazed how a 40 years old UX paradigm is still being used virtually unchanged in modern systems.

Spreadsheets are truly ubiquitous in the financial industry, and for 20 years I've been struggling with exactly the same issues mentioned in the article and in other comments here.

The problem is that neither Excel, nor most alternatives treat a spreadsheet as code that it essentially is. And being code, it needs to - be source control friendly - be testable - have business logic (formulas) decoupled from presentation

Only then one can seriously consider using a spreadsheet as part of any production grade system.

For the past couple of years I've been working on https://ellx.io - a platform for visual reactive programming and a new generation spreadsheet/notebook designed to solve exactly this pain point.

Here are some examples of what you can do with it:

[1] https://ellx.io/dmaevsky/monte-carlo

[2] https://ellx.io/matyunya/tensorflowjs-simple-demo

[3] https://ellx.io/ellx-hub/plot

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

#150

Post by ZeroCool2u »

hermitcrab wrote: post #117
kfk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alteryx files are xml files but the point is change management is hard to do. You need to compare each single element in the UI to understand what was changed between versions. It's a lot like Excel in that regard.

I guess diff'ing 2 xml files isn't ideal to see what changed. Do you have a better solution in mind?

Technically, you can diff 2 XML files, but Alteryx will make slight alterations to the xml literally everytime you open it, even if you make no changes and it's a huge amount of spaghetti XML that is absolutely not meant to be parsed by human eyes.
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