Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work

lemire.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 200 posts

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

#131

Post by yodsanklai »

jasode wrote: post #49

(Since the blog's website is not responding, I had to read the article from google's cache[1]) The author has well-intentioned advice about avoiding MS Excel but it's misguided. The criticism fails to accommodate the reason why MS Excel was used. MS Excel is the lingua franca of non-programmers . Thomas Piketty is a trained economist, not a programmer. It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (yea…

"It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (years) of his time to master C++/Python/Scala/Fortran/etc to avoid using Excel."

I tend to disagree. Mr Piketty graduated in Mathematics (from a highly selective institution). It is realistic to expect him to be able to use those tools if needed.

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

#132

Post by EpicEng »

dragonwriter wrote: post #60
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. 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…

Don't forget scientists. I am an engineer at a biotech company and they use Excel for everything. You may be amazed at what they can do with it (and horrorstruck by the systems/workflows they implement with it).

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

#133

Post by chris_mahan »

sitkack wrote: post #118
kiyoto wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True that.

I use SQL extensively, and never run into all these problems other people run into.

I also don't use ORM. there's so much you can do well and fast with SQL.

(I've also seen dreadful abominations in sql, like stored procedures that dynamically generate code for pivot tables... wait, that was me who did that)

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

#135

Post by nucleardog »

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…

I was watching a show the other day where they discussed their mapping of Benjamin Franklin's social network (who he communicated with, where they were in the world, etc). They showed some of the process and it appeared to involve some Excel workbooks with hundreds of sheets and terribly normalized data.

I can only imagine the amount of work involved in trying to extract any sort of useful information from the raw data in that format. I run into stuff like this all the time.

All I could think was that given a day and a Postgres+PostGIS server someone could have probably saved them entire man-months of their time...

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

#136

Post by Renaud »

miahi wrote: post #113
andrewfong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's actually F9. F5 opens the Go To dialog box.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

miahi wrote: post #113
andrewfong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by Someone »

frandroid wrote: post #117
andrewfong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never use it, but you can toggle between showing formulas and showing values with CTRL + ` (grave accent) (http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/excel-help/display-or-hid...)

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

#139

Post by jmount »

acqq wrote: post #110
jmount wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With spreadsheets a lot of steps needlessly require human transcription (cut/paste, typing and so on). So there is a casual relation.

Steps require "human transcription"? I think you've got a wrong term, and if you mistype the data you have on the paper when making a spreadsheet I don't see why you wouldn't when doing the same typing using your text editor.

"Manual intervention" would have been better. The steps involved can be copying and pasting, selecting a range (very nasty if you miss and don't notice), and even typing data from another source. Compare that to something like R where you typically load the data (even from a URL) with command like "read.table()" and most operations are implicitly over the whole data frame (no copying of data from paper required).

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

#140

Post by monochr »

yodsanklai wrote: post #131
jasode wrote: post #49

(Since the blog's website is not responding, I had to read the article from google's cache[1]) The author has well-intentioned advice about avoiding MS Excel but it's misguided. The criticism fails to accommodate the reason why MS Excel was used. MS Excel is the lingua franca of non-programmers . Thomas Piketty is a trained economist, not a programmer. It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (yea…

"It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (years) of his time to master C++/Python/Scala/Fortran/etc to avoid using Excel." I tend to disagree. Mr Piketty graduated in Mathematics (from a highly selective institution). It is realistic to expect him to be able to use those tools if needed.

Until you realize that there is more to mathematics than discrete mathematics. For someone doing, let's say, Topology computers are so useless you could well spend your entire postgraduate life without using anything more complicated than Word.
Post reply on HN