You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by noinsight » Wed, May 28, 2014, 5:54 AM UTC

pmelendez wrote: post #46

Pxtl wrote: post #11

Honestly, I don't have a problem with the fact that Excel is used in so many cases - programming for non-programmers is important. My problem is that Excel is terrible . Its formula system is painful and the formulas are invisible. It's not that a light user DB/spreadsheet program is a bad idea, it's that Excel made a lot of terrible decisions 20 years ago and now they're married to them.

>"My problem is that Excel is terrible" Do you know a better alternative? I have used LibreOffice and Numbers and I will take Excel any day. Saying that it is terrible is a very strong statement for a piece of software that arguably is what keep a lot of people in the Windows world.

Gnumeric isn't bad, I've been using that. It supposedly has 100% coverage of Excel functions.

But sure, it's a GTK app and so it looks more like Office 2003 than Office 2010.

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

#162

Post by was_hellbanned » Wed, May 28, 2014, 5:56 AM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #105

wikwocket wrote: post #92

Let me get this straight. It is hard to review, test and maintain code in Excel workbooks, so we should instead write custom software for these tasks?! Custom software is, to a non-hacker, the definition of "difficult to review, test, and maintain." You may as well suggest they input their data into a mystery box with some pixies inside who will crunch the numbers for them. :) Remember, Excel (and spreadsheets in gen…

> It is hard to review, test and maintain code in Excel workbooks, so we should instead write custom software for these tasks?! Well, maybe before we attempt to send men with guns to further deprive people of their property and liberty (which is, of course, the end goal of Piketty's work and advocacy of a global wealth task) we should determine whether or not his results are, y'know, true ? I know, I know, truth is s…

What a stunningly off-topic, irrelevant comment.

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

#163

Post by minusSeven » Wed, May 28, 2014, 6:16 AM UTC

twistedpair wrote: post #48

panarky wrote: post #32

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 like how people use tools for their own good and then blame them solely for everything going wrong. The least people using spreadsheet should have done is have a form of background check not using spreadsheet to check if their data is near correct value.

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

#164

Post by stormbrew » Wed, May 28, 2014, 6:47 AM UTC

waps wrote: post #153

analog31 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They have loads of theoretical advantages : 1) spreadsheets are a purely functional programming language. When you point this out to management users of it (after explaining what it is), they wouldn't want to live without it. So in reality the most widely used programming language in the world, is a purely functional one. 2) they are NOT turing complete (assuming you stay away from VBScript) Of course, they're worse…

Re. naming things, In the original BASIC, variable names were also quite limited. A-Z, A[0-9]-Z[0-9], which is actually an even more limited space than most spreadsheets which allow for something like [A-Z]{1,4},[0-9]{1,4} at least.

You could also argue that spreadsheets are kind of homoiconic, since code and data occupy the same structure. But that's a bit of a stretch.

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

#165

Post by kitsune_ » Wed, May 28, 2014, 6:51 AM UTC

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #86

This is all fine, but he doesn't suggest an alternative. Which, of course, there aren't any. Which is the reason it's a problem.

Don't social scientists and economists spend a huge amount of time learning statistical software such as SPSS or Stata or Gauss? Why bother with Excel?

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

#166

Post by girvo » Wed, May 28, 2014, 6:59 AM UTC

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #141

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…

(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.

My mother was a senior accountant at one of the Big Four accounting firms, and spent so much time Excel that she once built a Gantt chart in it.

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

#167

Post by bjoerns » Wed, May 28, 2014, 7:02 AM UTC

"The fact that they use spreadsheets suggests that they spend very little time worrying about accuracy." I don't get it. Why does the fact that a person uses a particular piece of software suggest that they don't care about accuracy? Does this mean that just because I use R or Python I worry more about accuracy? Really? I think it has more to do with loss of control - real developers hate Excel because it gives business people something they can work with straight away. Every time there's a bug which could remotely be related to spreadsheets, people start another wave of Excel-hate. As if this was entirely impossible in a real programming language. Don't get me wrong, spreadsheets are not perfect by any means. But neither is anything else in this world. It purely comes down to choosing the most suited tool for a given problem. And in Piketty's case there's nothing wrong with choosing Excel.

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

#168

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, May 28, 2014, 7:06 AM UTC

bjoerns wrote: post #167

"The fact that they use spreadsheets suggests that they spend very little time worrying about accuracy." I don't get it. Why does the fact that a person uses a particular piece of software suggest that they don't care about accuracy? Does this mean that just because I use R or Python I worry more about accuracy? Really? I think it has more to do with loss of control - real developers hate Excel because it gives busin…

Did you read the article? The author spends most of it attempting to justify that exact point. You may or may not agree with their arguments, but saying "I don't get it" without addressing any of those arguments isn't a useful response.

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

#169

Post by dagw » Wed, May 28, 2014, 7:11 AM UTC

kitsune_ wrote: post #165

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #86

This is all fine, but he doesn't suggest an alternative. Which, of course, there aren't any. Which is the reason it's a problem.

Don't social scientists and economists spend a huge amount of time learning statistical software such as SPSS or Stata or Gauss? Why bother with Excel?

Not in my experience (economics). An econometric class used Stata and I know a couple of statistics classes used SPSS, but beyond that it was use whatever you want, just get the job done. And for most people "whatever you want" was Excel, with a few people using Matlab. I never saw anyone using Stata when they didn't have to.

Admittedly one reason for this was that all student machines throughout the university had Excel installed and all the students had Excel on their laptops, while Stata was only available in a couple computer labs. And it's pretty much the same once you get out to the working world. No matter where go in the world or what office you walk into, if you sit down in front on windows machine, it will have Excel. Convincing your boss to buy you Stata or SPSS just so you can do a couple of quick statistical tests that you are perfectly capable of doing in Excel is just too much of a hassle most of the time.

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

#170

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, May 28, 2014, 8:41 AM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #42

JasonFruit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your confidence in the layman is inspiring. Why is == more difficult to understand than parentheses for function calls, for example?

Because highschool math acquainted them with the notion that a function call looks like afunctioncall(argument) thanks to sin(x) and cos(x) and log(x). Some people will even have vague notions of functions with multiple variable inputs like f(x,y). Basically, highschool math introduced a lot of syntax that users will be familiar with - we're universally okay with the typical +-/* operators, for example, and ^ isn't a…

If you think it's normal to write sin(x), cos(x), or log(x), you've been away from math for too long. Those would nearly always be written much more conveniently as sin x, cos x, and log x. You see parentheses when you have complicated arguments, but using parens in sin(3x+4) doesn't really differ conceptually from using them in 5 · (3x+4), and nobody thinks you need parens for multiplication -- compare 5 · 3x or just a simple statement like 15 · 4 = 60.

f(x) is different; you're right about that one.