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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

timharford.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#161

Post by alephu5 »

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…

I think the best approach in many cases is to bring data management into a specialised application, rather than using spreadsheets as a database. They can use the CRUD applications we all write or some off-the-shelf solution, but the important thing is that it provides validation, schemas etc.

Then you provide a spreadsheet export or direct connection that can be hooked into another spreadsheet with all the formulas, pivot tables and so on.

This way the core data is safeguarded and kept clean while not requiring constant development for every report requested.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#162

Post by skipnup »

catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

But you can just drag the input field larger and add line breaks?

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#163

Post by FriedrichN »

catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

I'll give a free cookie to whoever gets this done.

Sometimes I'll get these spreadsheets with byzantine formulas that I have to copy it to a text editor and format myself to make sense of all the parenthesis.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#164

Post by FriedrichN »

skipnup wrote: post #162
catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

But you can just drag the input field larger and add line breaks?

You could, but when you finally press enter it's all compressed back to one line.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#166

Post by CJefferson »

wibblewobble123 wrote: post #105
CJefferson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jupyter is a joke compared to spreadsheets, it doesn't auto-recalculate when you edit cells.

Observable does. So does Julia’s Pluto.jl. You’re not paying attention to the space but recalculating notebooks are gaining popularity.

Things are getting better. I was aware of them, but jupyter is the 600 pound gorilla in this area.

I wouldn't use observable, as you are tied to their web service, and I've had too many companies close to use such a service for important data. Pluto is promising, but (I believe?) Only supports Julia, which is growing but still not that popular, or known.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#167

Post by hermitcrab »

NoPicklez wrote: post #107

I work in a global firm that would be the poster child for using spreadsheets, especially spreadsheets that are used for calculations or drawing conclusions. The firm was made a huge move to Alteryx as a future replacement and is an immediate improvement over Excel. Which in my opinion is fantastic and a much much easier to review platform than Excel. For those that may not have used Alteryx, I'd highly recommend tak…

Other, less expensive, alternatives are also available such as Easy Data Transform and Knime.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#168

Post by raxxorrax »

max46 wrote: post #142
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 think I big mistake people make here is that they think they are far better at everything on a computer than a non-programmer. They don't realize how much you can do in Excel and how much they suck at it. If you can't use it without a mouse and/or if you don't know pivot tables, you are just as much of a beginner as a C++ programmer who doesn't know what a pointer is. It's only after trying to convert an excel shee…

Entirely true. Many physicists also basically live in Excel. And replicating the functionality of pivot tables isn't at all trivial and they also have a lot of helpers by now. In many cases you just need to click it and have all column neatly formatted so that you don't have to do much anymore.

I also have seen Access applications with more features than a common Salesforce CRMs. I have seen it as a navigation system that could bring you to the nearest partners or shops that provide necessary parts. Yes, there is code of doom behind it and if those maintainers leave the company, problems arise. But the feature set was often extremely hard to beat.

And I am not sure how to respond to non-technical users about better alternatives. They use it as a front end for SQL manipulation and it isn't easy to come up with something better for that target group.

Even worse is SharePoint. It is a complete abomination, it can easily beat most horror novels. But the workflow engines are just extremely practical for corporate processes. Only recently some alternatives came to the market... I just wish I could kill it...

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#169

Post by HPsquared »

FriedrichN wrote: post #164
skipnup wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can just drag the input field larger and add line breaks?

You could, but when you finally press enter it's all compressed back to one line.

It doesn't get compressed back, I often break complex formulas into multiple lines with indentation.

The only disadvantage is if someone else isn't expecting the formulas to be like this, then gets confused when they can only see the first line.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#170

Post by kwyjobojoe »

markus_zhang wrote: post #141
kwyjobojoe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use spreadsheets to manage data that would 1000% be better suited for storage in a database (and extracted the data would be sooooo much simpler than my monthly half day job of updating management reports). Why? Because we don't have access to any databases. I dread to think of the requests and committees I would need to find and traverse to get a database set up for my team, let alone a system that I can write an…

Now that you mentioned, we didn't have access to SQL Server dwh until 6 months before I left for good. Can you try sqlite? It's usually enough for simple things I think.

But then we need something to interface with the db. Getting any programming language installed isn't going to happen in government.
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