You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
1–10 of 200 posts
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#2It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel.
If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it.
Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#3Pretty much nobody will be getting right onto fixing this one, you can rest assured.
Those millions and billions of pounds and dollars and euros swishing back and forth in the financial centres? Yeah, Excel macros. BE AFRAID.
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#4Billions are made in the finance industry from Excel spreadsheets. Whole funds have been run from a single spreadsheet making buy / sell calculations, with a whole IT infrastructure designed to automate the execution of that single spreadsheet file.
Sure, it may be stupid, but it's democratized programming. That's why spreadsheets work.
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#5There have been a number of efforts to build a better spreadsheet. One that I was quite familiar with (I bought a license!) was Resolver One [1] that was trying to build a spreadsheet with support for Python at the cell-level. Unfortunately it didn't take off, and the team moved onto Python Anywhere [2]. Excel clearly has strong network effects!
I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were responsible for the credit crunch, that later possibly lead to Reinhart/Rogoff's flawed research using Excel... its spreadsheets all the way down!
[1] http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/ (but link appears to be dead [2] https://www.pythonanywhere.com [3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/vba_office_victory/
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#6It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel. If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it. Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.
I have. Working on open sourcing the code right now.
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#7Felienne 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 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.
There is an excellent video with her on InfoQ, explaining her spreadsheet formula refactoring tool Bumblebee (and the F# code behind it): http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#8Billions are made in the finance industry from Excel spreadsheets. Whole funds have been run from a single spreadsheet making buy / sell calculations, with a whole IT infrastructure designed to automate the execution of that single spreadsheet file. Sure, it may be stupid, but it's democratized programming. That's why spreadsheets work.
I remember working on a system at an investment bank in London before the GFC that valued exotic derivative portfolios on a grid of machines all running an instance of Excel; each trade was represented as a separate spreadsheet with well known locations for market data to be inserted.... madness!
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#9It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel. If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it. Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.
I used to work in business modelling and a part of that was creating and auditing spreadsheets so complex they fell into the "this should never be a spreadsheet" category. There are several proprietary excel addons which are designed to do exactly this. Unhelpfully I can't remember the name of the ones I used but if you Google "Excel Auditing Tools" you get quite a few.
Re: You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
#10There have been a number of efforts to build a better spreadsheet. One that I was quite familiar with (I bought a license!) was Resolver One [1] that was trying to build a spreadsheet with support for Python at the cell-level. Unfortunately it didn't take off, and the team moved onto Python Anywhere [2]. Excel clearly has strong network effects! I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were…
I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were responsible for the credit crunch
That's a rather aggressive phrasing of what the article says, that many of the calculations involved in the credit crunch were done in Excel/VBA.