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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#201

Post by threatripper »

iasay wrote: post #36
threatripper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does the job and it enables "regular folks" to solve business problems. This creates value. Most business problems don't require sophisticated IT systems. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about a sophisticated solution involving commercial software packages, databases, webservers, cloud services etc. and then I remember "If I bend the problem just a little bit it fits into an Excel table with a bit of VBA glue an…

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…

> 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.

Yes and no. I think it depends on the problem being solved. Many small companies solve the same problem. For them a working commercial solution should exist. Many other small companies exist because they can flexibly solve special problems. Special problems on which the big companies fail. Mainly because commercial software solutions don't exist and the problems often change quickly. In that case in-house-IT can be THE deciding advantage that makes them move faster than the competition. Yeah, it depends on the kind of problem being solved (or not solved) which is better and sometimes things change unexpectedly making the other choice better for some years.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#202

Post by pillefitz »

inglor wrote: post #94

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.

A simple way to connect to the cloud. We're moving all apps to the cloud, but users prefer to use Excel for most tasks. It's not clear to me how to handle MFA or AWS auth challenges in Excel, and we typically end up using Xlwings or similar, which is not very nice.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#203

Post by grigri907 »

inglor wrote: post #94

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.

I'd love to drag the formula bar into a vertical column, or its own window, thereby encouraging the use of new lines and indentations in complex formulas for clarity

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#204

Post by briandear »

taviso wrote: post #151
_dain_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a more detailed description of what you were trying? I can't know for sure, but it sounds like Excel can easily handle what you've described, if you use it right. >the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc. >(I was using Google…

> It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel in LibreOffice Calc" -- no you fucking well cannot. (And I use Linux on my personal computers full time). It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, beca…

Do Sheets and LibreOffice have Solver? No. They don’t.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#205

Post by elamje »

I started my career in one of the most profitable teams within Big 4 accounting because they leveraged software when the other firms were focused on spreadsheets. Our team had > 90% market share of accounting business with our sector of public companies for this reason alone. Most of our clients had millions of transactions and assets, and, while another firm had an excel model for this, there was no understanding of the model outputs because it was a black box of incremental computations. While I was there we landed one of the 20 or so remaining public co clients simply because we could show them every step math along the way - we had accountants and engineers that understood the logic in and out.

That said, most businesses can run on spreadsheets.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#206

Post by lancebeet »

whatever1 wrote: post #106

I can open a 20 year old excel file on a random pc and it will run perfectly. I will be able to reproduce results and inspect the exact equations generating these. Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever) As a fresh grad I used to hate excel, but now I can totally see why it will never die.

I find this statement quite fascinating because despite my limited experience working with excel I've seen countless compatibility issues, caused either by change of version of excel or change of locale. Perhaps this is caused by user error, but then it sure seems easy to make these mistakes.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#207

Post by Ruthalas »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #173
adepressedthrow wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that's what lots of non-developer white collar workers use Excel for? I imagine there's orders of magnitude more people using Excel for data processing rather than Python or R. I'm well aware it's not the best tool for the job, but yet people are using it for purposes such as that. I wanted to learn more about that experience.

I think no. Most people don't do table joins very often. They wouldn't know how. What they'll do instead is create lookups with VLOOKUP or INDEX(MATCH()) to pull in values from other tables into their one master. And once they have the master flat file they'll use a pivot table for group by aggregations.

This is very accurate in my experience, down to the suggested formulas.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#208

Post by hef19898 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
hef19898 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As part of that priesthood, Excel is neither SOX nor otherwise compliant. If users get rebuffed, that is the overall system working as intended.

As someone who has worked on both sides, if you don't want people making crappy excel-based, local-to-their-shop solutions, but they are because of the unresponsiveness and inutility of your central IT bureaucracy, the system is not, in fact, working as intended.

I think we are actually agreeing here. If users are left alone, they cannot be blamed for trying whatever they can to make things work. ERP only works when IT and business works together.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#209

Post by pjmlp »

inglor wrote: post #94

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.

I would state improving the VBA development experience that feels stuck in Office '97 days, but it will most likely be ignored.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#210

Post by pillefitz »

mathgladiator wrote: post #38
threatripper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does the job and it enables "regular folks" to solve business problems. This creates value. Most business problems don't require sophisticated IT systems. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about a sophisticated solution involving commercial software packages, databases, webservers, cloud services etc. and then I remember "If I bend the problem just a little bit it fits into an Excel table with a bit of VBA glue an…

I share that thought which is one of the reasons I'm so excited about the platform I'm building. While I'm trying really hard to focus on being a "vertically integrated board game company", there is the siren song to go beyond board games and make a platform for business. I wrote a programming language which is like a better structured Excel with a reactive database. It's super fun to play with at the moment, but it'…

Second time I'm seeing your platform. I still don't quite understand what it does exactly, but I'm intrigued nonetheless
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