Excel never dies (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#91

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #46

iasay wrote: post #36

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.

It cuts both ways, doesn't it? Excel is no replacement for a dedicated ERP system, as soon as you need one of those get one. Excel can replace a lot of analytics and KPI software packages, and fill in gaps in any ERP system. It is cheaper to, cautiously, fill those gaps with an Excel solution (if well documented) than developing a customized ERP solution.

I currebtly see people using Palantir as the default for anything and everything, only to export stuff from Palantir to Excel anyways.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#92

Post by opnitro » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

The video linked in the article has been set to private, anyone know of a public version? Or a brief summary of the contents?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#93

Post by _dain_ » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #64

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

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…

Many people have tried launching an Excel-with-SQL-querying product, but it’s extremely hard to do the UI well. Also products where people write SQL are impossible to insure.

>an Excel-with-SQL-querying product

This is basically what Powerquery is, and it's been built into Excel for years. And it does other things too.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#94

Post by inglor » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up.

P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#95

Post by TrackerFF » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

I use Excel every day. I just wish it had native support for Python or similar when it comes to scripting. VBA is OK - but it would be nice to get a more programming/script-driven Excel with support of languages you use for other things too.

Right now the way we go about this, is kinda hacky. But I have non-tech collogues that often request some methods or similar that I've developed, and that usually involves importing / manipulating / exporting excel files in Python. Would be much easier if they could just run the code within Excel, and get the desired results.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#96

Post by matwood » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #89

"Excel" became a synonym for spreadsheets. There are millions of SMEs, today, running on spreadsheets that aren't Excel. My wife runs her little SME with her paid-for Google Workspace / G Suite: she and her employees are happily filling 'em little cells from the browser in their Google world (for better or worse). There are millions of SMEs like these. I should know better and run some spreadsheet locally (or maybe u…

> Are these people actually all buying Excel to run it on their Mac? Or are Mac users not spreadsheet users!?

I was able to avoid actual Excel for years until I became responsible for my divisions budget. Accounting people are all Excel that I can see.

Until then I used Google Sheets and Numbers just fine on my mac. And when I was only viewing the budget, Numbers did fine converting or I could use Excel in read only mode.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#97

Post by lazide » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #65

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialized software is a market for lemons. Most businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are ill-equipped to judge the vendors in question, and more often than not the net result is worse than the Excel mess.

If you are an average business with no internal expertise to evaluate vendors: well of course everyone's going to spin you whilst the money keeps flying out of your pockets. Smarter companies would at least hire people that could advise on such things.

If you had the organizational expertise to hire such a person, and the leadership to prioritize it enough to happen - you already would probably not need them that much.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#98

Post by EddySchauHai » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

dccoolgai wrote: post #83

jrm4 wrote: post #6

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.)

As a developer, when I worked in VBA it was just way more rewarding and appreciated. I was way happier with the work I was doing and having a much bigger (and more visible) impact... Sadly I got paid roughly 1/4 of what I get paid now to muck around in package.json files all day. I know it's not fashionable to say,but yeah I feel like Excel is underrated and scoffed at by the "serious tech" community when it should b…

It's actually pretty technically awesome too. When I was studying for an MSc in CS I focused on program synthesis and one of the key papers of applied program synthesis is Flashfill in Excel (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...). It might seem boring but there's a lot of really cool stuff in the backend of it!

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#99

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #77

jrm4 wrote: post #6

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.)

I've seen Excel trive in no places more so than those commited to the "one true ERP" religeon. And it is not subversion. It is people trying to do their job despite draconian topdown unworcable policies and systems shoved down their thoat, keeping the operations side afloat in the face of debilitating managerial ignorance.

From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. Often with disasterous results, results that nobody really sees because it is just the status quo. Nothing wrong to use Excel for reporting and number crunching, ERP systems are not designed to do that.

I hate it when people take short cuts and corners because they refuse to accept that an ERP is there for a reason. I also hate it when the people setting uo an ERP ignore business needs. UX so is, rightly so, taking a back seat in all of these discusions.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#100

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #99

PeterStuer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen Excel trive in no places more so than those commited to the "one true ERP" religeon. And it is not subversion. It is people trying to do their job despite draconian topdown unworcable policies and systems shoved down their thoat, keeping the operations side afloat in the face of debilitating managerial ignorance.

From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. Often with disasterous results, results that nobody really sees because it is just the status quo. Nothing wrong to use Excel for reporting and number crunching, ERP systems are not designed to do that. I hate it when people take short cuts and corners because they refuse to accept that an ERP is th…

> From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering.

From experience, most Excel solutions are because people get rebuffed (or have learned by experience that they will expend lots of effort and the be rebuffed or given something not fit for purpose) by the bureaucratic processes necessary to get anything provided to them by their enterprise systems (ERP or otherwise) by the high priesthood that centrally administers those systems.