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Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing. This is an absurd claim. Any good spreadsheet will contain multiple self-tests, either in live formulas or via macros.
"good spreadsheet" I think the biggest problem is the small crossection of these two terms.
In the past a company y that I worked for went down and one of the factors was some wacky spreadsheet in our finance workflow :-(
JP Morgan's $6.2 billion "London Whale" trading loss: An unnamed overworked staffer in London copied and pasted the wrong figures into an Excel spreadsheet, throwing the firm's risk models out of whack. http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/18/jpmorgan-london-wh... Spreadsheet errors are reaching epidemic proportions globally. What we need is a transnational organization to contain the threat with research, best pra…
Knight Capital Group?
Users make mistakes, users given the power to work with computers that can cause billions of $ to be traded can cause billions of $ in losses. The solution would seem to be to limit the exposure, to put a cap on the amount of $ that a user could trade without going through some form of verification.
Spreadsheets may not be ideal, but they're the poor mans gate to programming and I suspect they don't have a bug incidence that is much greater than regular software developed by programmers.
Of course the programmers would love to believe otherwise.
JP Morgan's $6.2 billion "London Whale" trading loss: An unnamed overworked staffer in London copied and pasted the wrong figures into an Excel spreadsheet, throwing the firm's risk models out of whack. http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/18/jpmorgan-london-wh... Spreadsheet errors are reaching epidemic proportions globally. What we need is a transnational organization to contain the threat with research, best pra…
I used to work for Deutsche Bank. All financially modeling ran through Excel, though admittedly a massive C++ library that is a big Excel macro plugin. These sheets get massive and there are a few clusters of blades that do nothing but run Excel macros day and night. But why is this madness? It works for them . The iBanking world is the madness. You can put in place effective change controls and auditing with any sys…
I agree with you 100%. iBankers use Excel because it does what they want. One of the main reasons I left was because I got tired of trying to re-invent the excel wheel with every piece of software. There was always an inherent lack of trust that any UI was "doing it properly," so we always had to add the failsafe of export to CSV so people could do it themselves in Excel. Mind-boggling inefficiency.
Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing. This is an absurd claim. Any good spreadsheet will contain multiple self-tests, either in live formulas or via macros.
More often than not, the fact that a spreadsheet was used meant business was doing an end-run around lack of IT support initially to build the thing and wanted the quickest thing that appeared to work without any concern for (or even knowledge of) software development process, and its almost certain that in the history of changes (even if IT was forced later to adopt the spreadsheet) have been do the minimum required to meet each new requirement without really understanding what went before (often because the one person that understood what the original was doing has left.)
Which isn't really a problem with the tool, but with the social conditions which make the tool attractive to use in the first place.
One solution is to recognize when a given spreadsheets usage has increased to a point where it - or some portion of its functionality - would be better embedded in an application. Another is to have some users adopt a environment/language like R which addresses the short-comings listed above at the expense of being more complicated and less user-friendly. But there is no simple solution that is going to result in spreadsheets disappearing from use.
Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. ( http://www.felienne.com/publications ) Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" ( http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534 ) is particularly detailed. Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely t…
> Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool. Its largely used by business people because they (1) have inadequate IT support to have things develop…
edit: Based on your other comments downthread, I realized that you meant the IT department themselves should develop the application using "proper tooling", not the business people. That means that the business people will have to hand over requirements to the IT people, who will write the software. I think turn-around time may be too much for business people who want to do their own data exploration.
The beauty of Excel is its ability to do many things 'well enough' in a way that is accessible to a lot of people. My dad put together his architectural plans for a new house in Excel because it is a tool with which he felt comfortable. Some people do calendars in Excel while others try and recreate a full General Ledger system. Because it works well enough, people don't see the need to invest the time in learning a…
Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. ( http://www.felienne.com/publications ) Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" ( http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534 ) is particularly detailed. Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely t…
> Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool. Its largely used by business people because they (1) have inadequate IT support to have things develop…
If you just need to sum a list of numbers, or quickly calculate payroll or something, Excel does a fine job. For certain types of engineering calculations (the horror), Excel does a fine job.
The overhead of having a full developer implement the tool is absurd, because many of these problems can and should be solved in less than 10 minutes of spreadsheet jockeying.
Billions are made in the finance industry from Excel spreadsheets. Whole funds have been run from a single spreadsheet making buy / sell calculations, with a whole IT infrastructure designed to automate the execution of that single spreadsheet file. Sure, it may be stupid, but it's democratized programming. That's why spreadsheets work.
I remember working on a system at an investment bank in London before the GFC that valued exotic derivative portfolios on a grid of machines all running an instance of Excel; each trade was represented as a separate spreadsheet with well known locations for market data to be inserted.... madness!