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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

#141

Post by MisterBastahrd »

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…

(3) It's ubiquitous, because virtually every serious company with financials uses Office, so (4) employees are expected to know how to use them because their senior members have used them for decades. I know plenty of financial analysts with different companies in different positions and every single one of them spends time every day nose-deep in Excel.

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

#142

Post by monochr »

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…

"Lastly, some of Piketty's errors were transcription errors. In other words, GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Therefore, using Python while there were GIGO issues isn't going to solve the data problem."

More importantly the people claiming there are errors in hi work are making an even clearer error than Piketty in claiming that inequality hasn't risen. It has, and it is shown on dozens of measures. That they are trying to fight something as well established in main stream economics as evolution is in biology leads me to believe that in this case it is ideological windmill fighting more than honest critique.

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

#143

Post by joe_the_user »

Just a default note that the whole "he got stuff wrong" claim itself might not stand up to scrutiny.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/is-piketty-all-w...

Edit: Also regarding the Rogoff data. Sure, those findings really were crap but surprise, surprise, it was crap that policy makers were oh so eager to hear. One might blame the falsity on the dumb use of spreadsheet but it seems more likely it was a case of "let's fudge data in a crap fashion till we come up with what people want to hear". Then when someone points out how it's crap, we always blame the spreadsheets.

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

#144

Post by aaronem »

gavinpc wrote: post #107
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 Rory Blyth cartoon has been ungoogleable for at least ten years now, but I still check every so often. Now here it is! http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm What I was going to say before unexpectedly finding that, is that the gap between Excel and Access is huge. I've made a living off of that gap at various points, and at some point I stopped thinking they were "doing it wrong" and started thinking, "whateve…

> ...at some point I stopped thinking they were "doing it wrong" and started thinking, "whatever makes you happy."

The secret to success in contract software development.

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

#145

Post by analog31 »

bane wrote: post #101
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…

What's interesting to me is that software spreadsheets are more or less just evolved version of what apparently VisiCalc got right on the first try. Sure software spreadsheets are basically just parroting the physical ledgers that came before them, but turning them into software almost immediately opened up a kind of dynamic that didn't exist before. The latest Excel is basically just an organically evolved VisiCalc.…

I'm not a computer scientist, but I think that spreadsheets were possibly ahead of their time in a couple ways:

1. They let novices build fairly effective user interfaces, just by entering headers for rows and columns.

2. If I understand what "data flow" programming is (based on using LabVIEW), then the formula cells in spreadsheets are such a thing. Each formula is recomputed whenever its inputs change. That creates an incredibly quick testing cycles. Displaying intermediate results by necessity creates a built in debugger.

In addition, the lack of "complete" programming features, such as loops, may make spreadsheets less forbidding for novices to create and debug.

If these things are, as I suspect, compelling enough on their own, then like you say, the rest of the stuff in the latest Excel would just be icing on the cake -- not that I'd give up any of it.

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

#146

Post by eddyparkinson »

The process NOT the tool.

Yes spreadsheets have errors, but the only method I know of that is able to get error rates down to near zero is due process. There are good processes that reduce error rates to near zero, but there are no tools that reduce error rates to near zero. The problem is the process, not the tool.

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

#147

Post by dragonwriter »

bane wrote: post #101
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…

What's interesting to me is that software spreadsheets are more or less just evolved version of what apparently VisiCalc got right on the first try. Sure software spreadsheets are basically just parroting the physical ledgers that came before them, but turning them into software almost immediately opened up a kind of dynamic that didn't exist before. The latest Excel is basically just an organically evolved VisiCalc.…

> Efforts to move them into databases or whatever be damned. A spreadsheet is != to a database table except maybe in the most abstract possible sense in some cases.

The problem is that very often, spreadsheets are used as databases because they are the tool the user is familiar with, not because the application is inherently more suited to a spreadsheet.

> They really are different things and I agree that issues with spreadsheets should be solved by improving the tools not trying to paradigm shift spreadsheet users into an inappropriate environment that also happens to have a very long and highly skilled environment setup requirement.

There is no reason a database using a relational data model (but not the multiuser/concurrency features that are also part of the relational model) needs to have a "long and highly skilled environment setup requirement", or, in fact, be any harder to setup than installing an app just like a spreadsheet app would require.

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

#148

Post by dragonwriter »

eddyparkinson wrote: post #146

The process NOT the tool. Yes spreadsheets have errors, but the only method I know of that is able to get error rates down to near zero is due process. There are good processes that reduce error rates to near zero, but there are no tools that reduce error rates to near zero. The problem is the process, not the tool.

> The process NOT the tool.

But the tool constrains the process, which is why you should choose tools by appropriateness to the process they are going to be used in.

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

#149

Post by sheetjs »

dragonwriter wrote: post #147
bane wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting to me is that software spreadsheets are more or less just evolved version of what apparently VisiCalc got right on the first try. Sure software spreadsheets are basically just parroting the physical ledgers that came before them, but turning them into software almost immediately opened up a kind of dynamic that didn't exist before. The latest Excel is basically just an organically evolved VisiCalc.…

> Efforts to move them into databases or whatever be damned. A spreadsheet is != to a database table except maybe in the most abstract possible sense in some cases. The problem is that very often, spreadsheets are used as databases because they are the tool the user is familiar with, not because the application is inherently more suited to a spreadsheet. > They really are different things and I agree that issues with…

The excel database functions (DAVERAGE, DCOUNT, DGET, DMAX, DMIN, DPRODUCT, DSTDEV, DSUM, DVAR) give you about 90% of what you want in a database with a query "language" that's simpler than SQL.

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

#150

Post by dragonwriter »

sheetjs wrote: post #149
dragonwriter wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Efforts to move them into databases or whatever be damned. A spreadsheet is != to a database table except maybe in the most abstract possible sense in some cases. The problem is that very often, spreadsheets are used as databases because they are the tool the user is familiar with, not because the application is inherently more suited to a spreadsheet. > They really are different things and I agree that issues with…

The excel database functions (DAVERAGE, DCOUNT, DGET, DMAX, DMIN, DPRODUCT, DSTDEV, DSUM, DVAR) give you about 90% of what you want in a database with a query "language" that's simpler than SQL.

> The excel database functions (DAVERAGE, DCOUNT, DGET, DMAX, DMIN, DPRODUCT, DSTDEV, DSUM, DVAR) give you about 90% of what you want in a database with a query "language" that's simpler than SQL.

As someone who has worked rather extensively with both, no, they give a lot less than 90%, and for even fairly simple uses they are often more complex to use than SQL.

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