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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

#181

Post by n4r9 »

jasode wrote: post #109
n4r9 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 step…

Ok, it might try to deduce the data type, but you can set it in the import options that appear when you open a CSV file. Excel will automatically convert a string like "2-4" to "02-Feb" upon opening a CSV file. No import options appear when you open the file. If you then save the file it then uses that new string. As far as I can tell there's no way to stop it doing this.

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

#182

Post by giardini »

Jocelyn Ireson-Paine (JIP) et al developed software years ago that converts spreadsheets to language and vice versa, so you can write in code and then generate a corresponding spreadsheet. This two-way capability aids, among other things, in debugging spreadsheets. JIP is in euSPRIG (see http://eusprig.org/best-practice.htm ). Here are some links:

http://j-paine.org/eusprig2005.html

https://www.i-nth.com/tag/jocelyn-paine

http://www.j-paine.org

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

#183

Post by iagovar »

viraptor wrote: post #129
iagovar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is amazing. Thanks for pointing out knime. There were so many occasion since and including uni where I wish I could've used that.

It's pretty useful for data manipulation. I use it for very heavy lifting (millions of rows with A LOT of text manipulation, regex, and even some ML) with a Dual Xeon + 32 GB Ram and it's a beast. It takes some time to master, but I encourage you to play with it.

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

#184

Post by iagovar »

dagaci wrote: post #122
iagovar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it just a better "Excel" or does it have some actual feature to prevent people making mistakes?

Take a look and you'll understand it right away. It's organized with nodes and links. Nodes perform operations, and links transport data between nodes. You can arrange them visually as you please. There's even stuff like "metanodes" that allow you to put nodes inside, so you don't have to have a messy playground.

Most nodes (there are official and 3rd party nodes) do have error output, and there's a console to inspect what's going on.

You can also inspect data visually in most nodes.

Even someone who is not used to play with data, who doesn't understand consistency and yada yada will understand the advantages.

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

#185

Post by OzCrimson »

intended wrote: post #124
lloeki wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Charting in excel is a million times faster and easier than having to learn an entire language. Can’t we simply accept this for what it is? Code nerds preferring a code solution while normal people simply use the modern equivalent of graph paper?

BRAVO

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

#186

Post by heavenlyblue »

OzCrimson wrote: post #176
heavenlyblue wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I don’t believe that you could not use Excel to cleanse the data and then put it back in the database. And I also do not believe that a python script would not do the same cleansing of the data in a much more maintainable way.

You've got all the answers about a company in Chicago in 2005-2008 and how it should have been run. Why didn't you jump in and help us?

I am not giving you advice on how to run a company, I am saying that your anecdotal opinion will not affect my decision-making process. And I am clearly stating that it should not affect the decision-making of other people here either.

Also I am going to underline that what you did was relevant 16 years ago; which you did not state in your initial message about the usefullness of Excel.

Which is kinda funny, if I didn’t ask you would have otherwise omitted a lot of otherwise relevant information which makes your opinion even less important.

It only makes me question why do you take this whole thread so personally? Probably because by now your skills are way less relevant than back in 2005.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

hermitcrab wrote: post #91
kfk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alteryx was my first step into analytics and it helped me get 2 heads funded for my team. But yeah at some point I arrived to your same conclusion and moved my team to python, we never looked back. One thing people don’t realize with these UI tools is that there is no way to use a version control system and I nowadays I cannot think of doing any analytics (including basic BI) without git.

Why can't you version them? Do they all use binary formats?

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by NoPicklez »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #64
NoPicklez wrote: post #4

I 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…

As someone who has personally had to use Alteryx in multiple projects, fuck Alteryx. What an absolute garbage piece of software. I've already written a rant about it before and I don't have the energy to repeat myself, but do not fool yourself into thinking switching from excel to Alteryx is doing yourself any favors. You're just trading one monster for another. Save yourself a huge amount of money, not to mention yo…

Interesting, may I ask for some examples?

My point is moving from Excel to Alteryx, now the average population of people that uses Excel would not have the credentials to be able to stop using Excel and move to python to do the same job. I'm focusing on non-technical/programmers.

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

#189

Post by NoPicklez »

vikramkr wrote: post #8
NoPicklez wrote: post #4

I 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 fro…

I'll stop you right there when I say that the firm I work at is a global finance and consulting firm and has globally started shifting to using data analytics tools such as Alteryx over Excel.

The barrier to entry into Alteryx is nowhere near as difficult as say python or R for finance teams and consultants.

It is also seen as a mark of status to master a data analytics tool which improves a particular process either within the company or at a client.

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

#190

Post by setr »

hermitcrab wrote: post #22
jgilias wrote: post #19

Excel is a great case study. Turns out, if you give people an accessible and widely available Touring complete environment, they will manage to do pretty much anything with it. On another note, it's interesting to observe that the problems spreadsheets have are the same problems that plague poorly designed software everywhere - lack of documentation, lack of testing, lack of input validation, among others.

One of the big issues with spreadsheets is the lack of visibility. It is very hard to tell what is going on in any non-trivial spreadsheet. That something that visual data flow tools such as Alteryx, Knime and (my own) Easy Data Transform try to address. The other problem is specific to Excel. It just loves to mangle your data! The problem is so bad that geneticists have renamed some genes to stop Excel reinterpretin…

More problematic tbh is that excel doesn't really let you configure it for your setting: ideally you should be able to set it up with defaults suitable for genetic scientists, and then spread that configuration throughout the group.

Or if it does have this feature, no one knows how to access it

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