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You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

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Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#111

Post by watwut »

rrrx3 wrote: post #63
twistedpair wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Coincidentally, so did I. 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 ineff…

The value of export is beyond just checking on UI.

If they can expert it to Excel, then they can do whatever simple data analysis they just made up. No reason to wait for IT to implement whatever stats they are curious about, order it in some new way or whatever. Doing those things in excel is very fast and they get to have complete control over it.

Even if they only color cells and rows depending on some ad-hoc rule that will never be used again, excel still added them a lot of value.

Plus, I would pay gold for users that actually test system before relying on it. There is always shortage of testers and if the customer would do some of it, he deserves a discount.

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#112

Post by kiyoto »

untog wrote: post #75
dragonwriter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A lot of people who have access to Excel also have access to Access - and a lot of what they do would be better served in database than a spreadsheet. Yet they don't use one - there must be a reason for that, and I don't think it's IT restrictions.

SQL is scary.

I've talked to hundreds of customer prospects for Treasure Data, and by far the biggest surprise I encountered is how few people know their way around SQL. I am not talking about just "business" people but also programmers.

Contrast this dearth of SQL-proficient population with the massive, massive Excel user base: I jokingly tell my friends that Excel is by far the most popular programming language =p

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#113

Post by miahi »

andrewfong wrote: post #98
untog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who have access to Excel also have access to Access - and a lot of what they do would be better served in database than a spreadsheet. Yet they don't use one - there must be a reason for that, and I don't think it's IT restrictions.

This little tidbit from Chris Granger seems relevant: "Excel is inherently observable since it doesn't have any hidden state and all values are there for you to see and manipulate. It's also direct. You change values in the grid, drag drop things, do calculations on selections, and so on. And it manages to sidestep a lot of incidental complexity; spreadsheets are timeless, without setup, and don't even have a notion…

> don't even have a notion of being run

They actually do have such a notion - in Excel you can set the calculations to Manual and then you hit F5 to refresh everything in one go. Useful when you deal with current date and time.

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#115

Post by twistedpair »

thatthatis wrote: post #82

Spreadsheets ARE software, anyone arguing differently has insufficient experience in at least one of the fields to have an informed opinion. I've worked professionally in both, and the argument in this article is bunk. Spreadsheets are a different kind of software with advantages and disadvantages compared to compiled/scripted languages. How do you treat a spreadsheet as real software: * One operation per cell * Inpu…

… but I will not use Microsoft Excel to run a bank or to compute the trajectory of the space shuttle

Does the author realize that Excel is not used to run banks or to track the space shuttle? Sure, some traders might base their models on Excel. But, the actual exchanges, trade routing and account general ledgers are all on very tightly controlled systems, usually mainframes in the case of ledgers. To boot, NASA does not use a VBA Excel plugin to schedule burns and execute reentry. (Excel 2007 won't even run on a 8086 chips)

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#116

Post by jimmcslim »

seanstickle wrote: post #7

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.

Indeed. Here's a great quote from 2005: "databases are rocks, spreadsheets are water": http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/051115_master_foo.h...

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#117

Post by frandroid »

andrewfong wrote: post #98
untog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who have access to Excel also have access to Access - and a lot of what they do would be better served in database than a spreadsheet. Yet they don't use one - there must be a reason for that, and I don't think it's IT restrictions.

This little tidbit from Chris Granger seems relevant: "Excel is inherently observable since it doesn't have any hidden state and all values are there for you to see and manipulate. It's also direct. You change values in the grid, drag drop things, do calculations on selections, and so on. And it manages to sidestep a lot of incidental complexity; spreadsheets are timeless, without setup, and don't even have a notion…

Saying Excel doesn't have any hidden state is stretching things a bit--your formulas don't show up until you are directly on them, so mistakes (formula results that got turned into static data, for example) are hidden until you put your cursor directly onto them.

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#118

Post by sitkack »

kiyoto wrote: post #112
untog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who have access to Excel also have access to Access - and a lot of what they do would be better served in database than a spreadsheet. Yet they don't use one - there must be a reason for that, and I don't think it's IT restrictions.

SQL is scary. I've talked to hundreds of customer prospects for Treasure Data, and by far the biggest surprise I encountered is how few people know their way around SQL. I am not talking about just "business" people but also programmers. Contrast this dearth of SQL-proficient population with the massive, massive Excel user base: I jokingly tell my friends that Excel is by far the most popular programming language =p

Much of the ORM market and NoSQL were precisely because programmers don't understand SQL.

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#119

Post by mantrax5 »

We've done business with pen and paper for thousands of years.

I think we can handle spreadsheets. While I'm a programmer and often find it easy to whip up a program to do what many would do in a spreadsheet, I don't have the arrogance to tell people to not use spreadsheets for serious work.

On the contrary, I encourage it. It's a wonderful tool, and, in the end, superior to pen and paper.

Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

#120

Post by pasbesoin »

I've observed disasters created in spreadsheets. I've also observed -- and occasionally created -- robust models and calculations.

One flipside is that, if you know what you're doing, it's very easy to created orthogonal calculations and comparisons in order to check your work. And, if something doesn't compare or look right, to track back step by step and through all the precedents to find the fault(s).

Databases can also create and hide problems, particularly if they are not understood and/or designed and set up properly. And some problems thusly created can be rather opaque, particularly to those without a good understanding of or access to the underlying design and the principles upon which it rests.

As with many things, ultimately I found that the problems lay not with spreadsheets, per se, but with the people using them and with the organizations that tasked those people without consideration for their capabilities (and limits thereof) and without adequate resources to do the job right.

Personally, there has been a time or three where -- in significant measure due to such resource constraints -- I would have been sunk without the flexibility that a spreadsheet -- often in combination with some programming and database work -- provided me. For example, I could quickly and programmatically deal with the 95% that was clean enough, and then manually go through and figure out and adjust the crap.

Ideal? Perhaps not. But then, "business" seldom is. (Nor "life", for that matter.)

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