Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#2This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine article [1].
[1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#3> A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes.
Then I believe it should say stop abusing Excel.
Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate data from 400+ sources, you're doing it wrong.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#4Sounds more like they should get a proper ERP and/or HR system to solve this.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#5The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself.
Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#6What should we use, then?
I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data.
After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on that schema and then give it to the non-tech people.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#7I think the problem is they're using Excel as a database as opposed to a spreadsheet. That's fine at small scale, it's easier to manage and even easier to get going, but Adobe scale? They should advise "Stop using Excel for what it's not".
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#8How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#9The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organization's needs. Excel is amazing, it's relatively easy to use, has immense power for dealing with calculations and graphs, and it is cheap. An organization's problem isn't excel, its the fact that they keep 20 copies of the same data and no one is keeping track of which is the source of truth.
Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
#10I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons
- excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc
- speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying
- analysis: It's easy to do some basic analysis without studying CS