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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

timharford.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#151

Post by kfk »

rexreed wrote: post #87
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, but this entirely misses the point of the article. It's not calling for the end of spreadsheets -- it's stating that there's an unspoken problem that demands our attention. Spreadsheets aren't 100% reliable for use cases where you need to collaborate and share immutable health records. Especially during a time of global emergency when tensions are heightened. Spreadsheets don't impose validation, sche…

You're also correct, but I think miss the point as well. The spreadsheet isn't going anywhere. Curse it all we might, blame it for deaths or attribute any aspect of malignment to it, and you'd be right. But the spreadsheet isn't going anywhere. Spreadsheet mistakes have been directly attributed not only to thousands of deaths but billions of dollars of mistakenly wasted money. Heck, in the UK alone, they have attribu…

It is very clear that they are useful but it is also very clear that they can be problematic. In Finance people check each number - multiple times per day - because there is no way to write tests in Excel. Sounds good? Until you can trust the people crunching the numbers, of course. Would you build a bridge like that? Or a building? I think it is worth to talk about this problem and, at the very minimum, inform people there are alternative ways to crunch numbers that are more reliable than Excel.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#152

Post by mikewarot »

I strongly doubt there is any other reactive programming environment that is easier to teach to novices than a spreadsheet.

One wonders what would happen if you could extend lisp to do reactive programming, and then extend it a bit further to load an excel workbook into an abstract syntax tree.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#153

Post by danuker »

> Foege would show up in a village in eastern Nigeria, all six foot seven of him, and the elders would put out the word, Come and see the tallest man in the world! And people did. Foege reckons he once vaccinated 11,600 people in a single day. It wasn’t enough to quash periodic outbreaks.

If only today's governments had the creativity to spark interest in vaccines.

In Romania, people distrust the vaccine, and I believe we're going to have a tough COVID wave again.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#154

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

gcthomas wrote: post #4

Spreadsheets are a hammer so if that's all you know then all problems look like the nail. Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start, but there are many options better than Excel for critical systems.

Spreadsheets are sometimes more readable than code. It’s harder for certain kinds of bugs to get through when you see the whole program, inputs, and outputs, and all intermediate states at once.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#155

Post by Closi »

codesnik wrote: post #90
Closi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start. I can write python, but I can get the answer out of excel in a fraction of the time for most use cases. As an added bonus, excel documents are far more ubiquitous and I can share them with clients, and they can see my workings. Python is…

> they can see my workings How? Do they check that every cell in a column actually has the same formula? Do they check data format everywhere? Python script is something that is possible to be actually reviewed, and results - reproduced, and "formula's" there are actually readable. But for some stupid reason excel files are still shared over email.

> Do they check that every cell in a column actually has the same formula?

They just have to check the top cell as most of my formulas are array formulas.

You don’t have to drag a formula down - that’s a common misconception in the latest versions. If you do =A1 + B1 and want to apply it to the 1000 cells below you just write = A1:A1000 + B2:B1000.

That’s still not that readable though, so I’ll apply those cells two named ranges “Sales” and “Taxes”.

Then the formula is = Sales + Taxes once and that will populate the whole column of data.

Then there’s M Code and PowerQuery which literally allows you to review the data cleaning line by line and even see the data state at any intermediary step. It also has

> Python script is something that is possible to be actually reviewed

The problem for me is that, as someone who works in consulting, it can’t be reviewed by my boss or a client, neither of whom can program. But they can review a tidy excel sheet.

And then they can’t edit it either, so if I go on holiday and I’ve built some sort of model nobody else can make progress until I come back, or if I move projects I’m also stuck maintaining the model on the old one.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#156

Post by pillefitz »

What's your opinion on VBA? I have successfully used it to build quite complex applications (position management in trading) and found it fast, reliable and easy to develop in a fraction of the time it took me to build an Electron application.. I have a really hard time going back to modern JS frameworks after having been exposed to Excel..

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#157

Post by throwawayboise »

grp000 wrote: post #139
navneetloiwal wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to work at in construction as an estimator and we used spreadsheets. No backups, no version control, a single value change took 10s of minutes to propagate through the many sheets in the file. We fixed errors when we saw them, but I always felt it was an exercise in pointlessness. These were not small companies either, ~$800M in yearly revenue for one, and ~$150M for the other. Then, afterwards, the end value…

I can't remember where I read it but at one point Boeing was maintaining the entire bill of materials for one (maybe more) of their aircraft in a spreadsheet. I tried to google it but could not find the reference. I did find that Boeing actually had their own in-house spreadsheet software for a while, which was kind of interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Calc

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#158

Post by starik36 »

pillefitz wrote: post #156

What's your opinion on VBA? I have successfully used it to build quite complex applications (position management in trading) and found it fast, reliable and easy to develop in a fraction of the time it took me to build an Electron application.. I have a really hard time going back to modern JS frameworks after having been exposed to Excel..

If Microsoft would update the core VB language to be a bit more modern, I bet a lot more professional developers would descend upon it. As it stands now, it’s in limbo because you can’t use it in the web version of excel.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#159

Post by throwawayboise »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #84
echelon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, but this entirely misses the point of the article. It's not calling for the end of spreadsheets -- it's stating that there's an unspoken problem that demands our attention. Spreadsheets aren't 100% reliable for use cases where you need to collaborate and share immutable health records. Especially during a time of global emergency when tensions are heightened. Spreadsheets don't impose validation, sche…

It would be hard, but I think a new kind of spreadsheet that was easier to validate, easily impose a schema and constraints and helps us identify human errors would be helpful. I bet excel has some excellent features around this, but they are not front and center in the UI.

Lotus Improv was a bit like that I think. It's been a long time since I used it. Wikipedia says:

Conventional spreadsheets used on-screen cells to store all data, formulas, and notes. Improv separated these concepts and used the cells only for input and output data. Formulas, macros and other objects existed outside the cells, to simplify editing and reduce errors. Improv used named ranges for all formulas, as opposed to cell addresses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

Like most of the software on the NeXT platform, it was ahead of its time.

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