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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

timharford.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#121

Post by lhh »

He mentions several times that accountants do their work in Excel, but any account would consider it barbaric to actually try to do transaction-level double-entry bookkeeping in Excel instead of a purpose-built system like QuickBooks/Xero/NetSuite/etc. I think I've also probably seen more broken financial models than logically sound ones in Excel, so the integrity of spreadsheets is oftentimes not even safe in the hands of finance professionals.

Data integrity is definitely a hard problem.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#122

Post by throwaway675309 »

asdff wrote: post #39
narush wrote: post #20

Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…

I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code. Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption t…

Wow, I don't know how you arrived at the conclusion that coding is somehow easier than excel. Excel/Google sheets is tabular wysiwyg and about as simple as it gets... even for children who get acquainted with tabular data relatively early (reading simple scientific graphs, etc)

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#123

Post by LasEspuelas »

dan-robertson wrote: post #65
ttul wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

Instead one only needs to worry that one can’t get one’s work done. I don’t think I’ve ever had a time when I wanted to use a spreadsheet for anything moderately complicated where gsheets was up to snuff. That’s not to say that excel doesn’t have problems or does things easily, but it doesn’t lead to quite the same level of frustration and hair-pulling, and indeed it’s usually possible to achieve things in excel when…

I have. Especially before Excel released their dynamic array features. I love the sort function in gsheets. Combined with filters it allowed me to automate things that relied on vba in Excel.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#124

Post by popinman322 »

arthurcolle wrote: post #113
thanhhaimai wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using a different tool for the job? Processing 3 millions rows of CVS sounds like a task that is more fitting for a small script than Excel/Google Sheet. Google Sheet excels at many other tasks, but it's not a replacement for specialized tool (and it should not).

Yes of course, I originally generated the file using Pandas but it's always a pain in the ass to remember the magical incantations to make pretty 2D graphs that aren't fugly. That being said, I have a knack for making great 3D graphs that are awesome! In any case, it's hard when my employer doesn't just gimme that juicy Excel subscription because cost-cutting and efficiencies. In the end I put on my robe and wizard h…

Seaborn in Python to make matplotlib pretty by default + plot some uncommon graphs. `%matplotlib widget` to make matplotlib interactive. Plotly in Python if you want decent graphs that are also interactive by default.

Observable if you want an interactive, hosted visualization notebook (and all their libraries are open source, except their UI). Plotly, Observable's Plot library, or D3 if you don't mind JavaScript. Can bundle libraries + data + visualization into a single html file and deliver that as an interactive report; once you have the base template down it's decently ergonomic.

Plotly is my current default when I'm working with Jupyter, though. Sane defaults are nice.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#125

Post by nicoffeine »

asdff wrote: post #39
narush wrote: post #20

Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…

I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code. Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption t…

> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel.

Every time a business user sits at a computer, are they going to spend 10 minutes getting it done, or 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get pip env configured so they can maybe eventually get it done? If by some miracle they are supernaturally gifted at programming and succeed after some weeks, they now have:

  - a nonstandard file format that will eventually break 
  - no real time feedback of formatting or calculation as they input/manipulate data 
  - no charting 
  - no GUI 
  - no "undo" button 
  - no import wizards 
  - no support (but I guess someone light years ahead of any dev talent I have ever seen wouldn't need it)
And all of this for a single use case.

Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Excepting the awful ribbon UI redesign, you could take any Excel 97 user, put them in front of the latest M365 version, and they could get the same work accomplished in the same amount of time.

You cannot say the same thing about almost anything else in the tech industry. Excel is terrible in a lot of ways. But it's a mostly reliable tool, has worked approximately the same way for 25 years, so people are going to use it and teach it. There's no point in wasting someone's valuable time with the horrifying fragility of the python/R/whatever ecosystem.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#126

Post by sheetjs »

navneetloiwal wrote: post #118
rexreed wrote: post #37

* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…

This! As programmers, it is easy to list N reasons why spreadsheets suck and deserve to die. But the reality is that it is the most ubiquitous business software and the non-tech/business users would rather be in a spreadsheet than anywhere else. Companies run on spreadsheets, even if they have the best "data stack" and tools. Because few, if any, software can beat the * flexibility (throw data anywhere and link it to…

> Spreadsheet evolution has been slow though.

Excel has to contend with nearly 40 years of backwards compatibility (MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, was released in 1982) and a deep userbase that literally has decades of experience and muscle memory with the software. The Symbolic Link "SYLK" file format introduced in MultiPlan is still supported in recent versions of Excel, leading to the infamous CSV "ID" issue.

Many of our users still run very old versions of Excel and Windows (e.g. Excel 5.0 on Windows 95) because a change in a future version of Excel caused problems or gave different results.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#127

Post by plaidfuji »

ttul wrote: post #61
rexreed wrote: post #37

* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…

Personally, I strongly prefer working with GSheets to Excel. It handles large sheets better and you never worry about the app crashing and taking your precious work along with it.

Wait, seriously? I find the exact opposite! I would love it if Gsheets were as performant as Excel with large tables but scrolling gets bogged way down. If you add too many formulas, Gsheets will get stuck recalculating formulas endlessly. I love Gsheets because of the ability to link between documents easily, their comment system, filter views, and native regex… but performance?? It’s terrible!

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#129

Post by johnwalkr »

narush wrote: post #20

Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…

“European Spreadsheet Risks Group” is the most European thing ever.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#130

Post by peterburkimsher »

xj9 wrote: post #29

i think spreadsheets could represent an interesting future programming paradigm, but excel is not the tool that'll do it.

I feel like the next major advancement in spreadsheets is nested hierarchy.

Specifically, iTunes (especially the older interface from iTunes 5 to 10) allowed for Playlist Folders and Smart Playlists.

Workbooks can have several sheets, but not in a nested structure. Same with SQL databases and tables. If I want to organise data (e.g. Country > Social group > Friend name/email/phone number) then it's easy to do in iTunes but difficult with typical Contacts apps.

Web browser bookmarks are pretty good, but the end object has only 2 fields (name and URL). So what I do is I have a fake-radio track object in iTunes, with all the extra tags. Double-clicking it loads a page on localhost, which launches a PHP script that then opens a URL in my browser (for the friend list) or document.

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