Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

Post by rjtavares » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #105

rjtavares wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by airstrike » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #126

jen729w wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifty hours a week? You might need to think about working less.

...or becoming more efficient - who knows?

Post by Moru » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

ptx wrote: post #61

sciurus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dates can be weird just about anywhere. I recently hit a bug where all data was being checked to see if it was a datetime, and python interpreted `st1` as September 1st of the current year. https://github.com/mozilla/frost/pull/330

Not really Python as such, it seems, but rather some third party library[1] which promises "generic parsing of dates in almost any string format". This is impossible to do correctly (what is 01/02/03?) and usually a bad idea to attempt. [1] https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

Post by deknos » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

OzCrimson wrote: post #99

deknos wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. it's not the only alternative. it's the only thing you and many other accept. Python+Jupyter is a real alternative.

You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.

Post by pvaldes » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

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.