51–60 of 275 posts
I've always hated excel. I'd much rather use R or Python. My first job used an Excel macro to automate tasks in a DOS emulator for some legacy software. It would take days to complete and would regularly crash. As they say, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
They're still using it!
As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
> Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented I would argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual human beings it affects. It goes from “if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented I would argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual human beings it affects. It goes from “if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week…
Is this a criticism of Excel specifically, or is the problem that it’s making basic arithmetic more accessible to institutions with negative externalities?
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…
I worked at several companies where the main competition is Excel and competing against it sucks because you have to change how people work to get them to use their product and people don't like that. They come up with "deal breakers" about why the software won't work for them and then imply that if you fix those things, they will adopt it. This is always false. I'm hoping my next job has another company as its main…
You have to have a compelling reason for changing away from an excel spreadsheet from a users perspective. If you give users their exact spreadsheet but in a web interface, you have probably given them zero benefit and removed all flexibility (i.e. what would have been a new column in three seconds is now a feature request to IT).
Then they go live and no one uses the service. Then it turns out there are "deal breakers" that mean they can't use the app. It's the same story over and over.
As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
> Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented I would argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual human beings it affects. It goes from “if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a criticism of Excel specifically, or is the problem that it’s making basic arithmetic more accessible to institutions with negative externalities?
It’s a criticism of spreadsheets in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Avoiding any custom software development and purchasing is the number one priority for small to medium businesses that want to survive if you ask me. I've seen a couple of them killed by software. At this point I'd rather work for a company that is held together with Excel than "domain specific enterprise software" having worked in that sector for years. Actually the most fun I ever had was being the "IT guy" as a se…
I've seen enough cases where the opposite is the case. Businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are often very inefficient, drowning in more problems than solutions and the day to day workflows for employees are awful. I'm not trying to say a small shop should go all in with Oracle or SAP, however a healthy investment in specialised software often pays off extremely well.
Or you hire someone who can shape the business processes towards efficiency with the tools you already have...
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…