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Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

wired.co.uk

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Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#161

Post by robscallsign »

lloeki wrote: post #85
OzCrimson wrote: post #80

Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that…

To me it seems Python or Julia notebook stuff like ipython or jupyter could (and did in some circles) displace Excel in almost all cases. The self-sustained inertia to change is real though.

Try deploying python apps in corporate environments with fairly locked down machines to non-programmers and get them to perform simple operations, and then compare that with just emailing someone an excel spreadsheet.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#162

Post by mmsimanga »

PeterStuer wrote: post #120

Having consulted in large enterprises, the main reason spreadsheets exist: A knowledge worker needs some form of automation support to do the job. Choices are: (a) spend a day drafting a rough spreadsheet, then over the next months tinker with it making it a bit better, more efficient and add more relevant functionalities. (b) put in a formal project request to IT. This will be put into the backlog, and most probably…

I work in Business Intelligence (BI) and the joke is that Excel is the best BI tool. My job starts after the new platform has delivered 33% of the functionality required. The rest of the functionality is in the Cobol system. Standard practice in BI is for business users to export spreadsheets/CSV from the different systems then use Excel to create the reports they want. No new BI software is going to magically solve the issues with data.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#163

Post by OzCrimson »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #148
OzCrimson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See. You've got answers to something that you haven't asked a single question about. But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions. Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it…

I would say that you probably do not know what you did wrong having done it in Excel. Stuff gets complicated really fast in Excel thus it’s much easier to do something that you can’t possibly debug and thus live in blissful ignorance.

It's just unbelievable ... how people KNOW about situations that they weren't in and don't ask any questions. But since you brought it up I can tell you about my accuracy in Excel:

- The process involved 2 people checking my work before it was sent to payroll. And we did catch and correct mistakes. We were able to trace back where and how the mistakes were make, and build in ways to prevent or flag future mistakes.

- The job was necessary because of all the garbage in the database. Excel's data-checking and data-cleansing and flexibility was superior to the database.

- After 1 year all of my work was audited. For several dozen sales people, there was ONE person I wasn't 100% accurate with. And that one was off by 0.5%. SUCCESS!

- If we'd gone with the report coming out of the database, things would have been such a confused mess.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#164

Post by racecar789 »

sjy wrote: post #68
gmueckl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Office was updated to use GPU accelerated rendering and I guess this has something to do with it. I don't know how this works (which API, which portions of the software, which algorithms) as details on that seem to be pretty sparse.

I don’t think so – Excel has felt significantly slower to me ever since they introduced the GPU “accelerated” interface.

Same here. From around Excel 2007 - 2013... activating the GPU acceleration option slowed Excel way down. I remember turning off the setting many times during those years to get better performance.

Fast forward to 2016-today...Microsoft fixed the GPU acceleration bugs.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#165

Post by OzCrimson »

Moru wrote: post #154
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The right solution to their problem" being a developer, at least as far as developers are concerned. Hammers and nails...

Sometimes that database feels more like a jetplane when all I need is a hammer for my nail. Excel (or libreoffice calc) is perfect for a lot of stuff, especially those small things that you won't ever do again.

100%

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#166

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Moru wrote: post #155
ptx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really Python as such, it seems, but rather some third party library[1] which promises "generic parsing of dates in almost any string format". This is impossible to do correctly (what is 01/02/03?) and usually a bad idea to attempt. [1] https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

There is actually some standards here at least. 01/02/03 has one order, 01-02-03 another. The character between tells you how to read them. Not that most people know how though...

>01/02/03 has one order

It has one order in the U.S and a different one in most other countries.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#167

Post by OzCrimson »

rjtavares wrote: post #151
Aeolun wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PowerBI/Tableau for reporting In my experience these take ages to load data that is near instant on Excel. I can totally see how people prefer excel.

It may take longer to load, but it allows you to automate the data processing. That's where the effort (and errors) usually lie...

How do you have so many answers to situations you haven't been in?

Do I need to say it again? My Excel skills were necessary because of garbage in databases.

I could sit at my desk; extract a data-dump of 50k rows of data; locate the fuzzy matches, identify which records needed to be kept and which ones deleted; merge it with the client's spreadsheet that they emailed to me and compare them; identify problems and report back to the angry client.

Why was the client angry? Because of inflexible garbage reports coming out of the database that people were blindly trusting.

Why was there garbage in the database? Not because of Excel.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#168

Post by OzCrimson »

pvaldes wrote: post #159
n4r9 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

Gnumeric or Tex combined with R can help also... There is ages since I opened an excel and I don't miss it.

BRAVO for you. And I mean that. You've got the tool YOU need and you haven't pushed YOUR tool on other people. Thank you.

Re: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

#170

Post by DanBC »

867-5309 wrote: post #169
867-5309 wrote: post #77

>£40,335 >start date they forgot to elaborate on this one

uncertain for the downvotes, care to share which date you see in those numbers..?

I don't know why you got downvotes.

Here's an explanation of the way Excel stores dates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809037

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