171–180 of 282 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 peopl…
Spreadsheet is the greatest SW ever invented, that's why it's so dangerous.
Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of gangrenous melanoma.
On the other hand, some people are happy to say that the complexity of sophisticated Excel models means they would have been better off built in a code interface. Ha ha ha!
Even with the right mix of functional and object-oriented code and suitable documentation and version control applied to code, I respectfully disagree.
Data handling capabilities could benefit from skill in all of these tools: error checking (including analytical review); pen & paper; calculators; databases; spreadsheets; math & stat techniques; Word processors (& clear logical explanations).
Together, they form a rich menagerie of tools which will probably all be around until we have an AI that follows us around and we just tell it what we want. Actually, even then, it would be good to know them so that we can grasp the underlying logic and frame the concepts leading to the actions that we ask the AI to assist with...
Data caught in spreadsheets is kind of an instance of the general siloing of data. The situation is something of a general problem of a data-driven Society. One group of people want information available with one interface and spends resources only in putting it in a format suitable - to the detriment of others who/want need it. With spreadsheets in particular, naturally you have a data-integrity but that's still an…
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.
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 think spreadsheets are a good way to program data transformations at all. Data transformations are inherently a pipeline/function abstraction, and even non-technical users understand that. Spreadsheets don't offer a good way to decompose a data transformation process and inspect each step for correctness. This alone makes them prone to calculation errors. Also, tables are an afterthought to spreadsheets, therefore even trivial joins are always a pain in Excel.
I have a good practical experience with building visual pipeline-based data transformation tools [1] for non-technical users and they have been a success.
* 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…
> From the first Visicalc to Excel 2300 I don't think we'll see the end of spreadsheets for a long time coming. We might even argue that spreadsheets were already used in 1295 BCE, as shown in Fig. 1.1 of [0]. [0]: http://uruk-warka.dk/mathematics/ER6%20tables.pdf
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..
For scripting a thing or two it's not terrible, but back then it wasn't so easy to split out the code for version control. Some formula for pricing this or that is gonna work in whatever language anyway and doesn't change a whole lot though.
It was when I started to pull FIX connections into it that I thought maybe it's time to do things properly. Then you're suddenly in need of understanding how the execution model works.
Also as soon as you need to follow a schema Excel is too soft. It's trivial for someone to just add an extra bit of info on a row that throws everything.