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I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

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Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#191

Post by rjtavares »

hef19898 wrote: post #123
halfeatenpie wrote: post #26

I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations. So many critical infrastructures, billions of dollars in planning, and just systems are built out of Excel. It's amazing. You'd assume something that services millions of people a day would have some more sophisticated and customized solution, but you're w…

So true, I used to run European cross-docking ops, planning, inventory, forecasting, scheduling, in Excel back the day. Successfully scaled by 100% YoY for three years. Was quite a lot of fun. Issue I have with that approach is not using excel per se. It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). That and ov…

I feel like PowerBI is a good solution to overcome Excel's deficiencies while working well with Excel. It forces you to structure your data and define measures while being dyanamic, efficient and friendly to less structured inputs.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#193

Post by Firadeoclus »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #107
viraptor wrote: post #21

My issue with spreadsheets is that they could be improved a lot with minimal changes, not nobody seems to do it in popular office packages. Making them more database-like and making table data first-class (at least you can make named tables in excel on windows) could be used to push people a bit more towards organised data, without changing how anything works. Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fac…

I agree. Both https://airtable.com/ and https://www.smartsheet.com/ in my option add some value on top. Unfortunately they are not omnipresent as Google Sheets and Excel. > Half of the mess that makes excel hell comes from the fact it's too easy to put two tables of data + some random constants on a single sheet and refer to them by H3. That is a feature. If you can keep in a screen all the data you need, you reduce…

> That is a feature. If you can keep in a screen all the data you need, you reduce the cognitive overhead of having to switch back and forth between tabs.

That's true, but it doesn't necessitate different tables living in the same row/column grid.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#194

Post by WeaselNo7 »

Spreadsheets are phenomenally flexible, but they obviously don't scale well or behave nicely with source control.

I work at Anaplan, and the most common way that our biggest customers discover us is when they've been bitten by spreadsheets as they've scaled, and now they have users emailing spreadsheets around and someone with a full time job collating them.

We've modelled the product around the flexibility, but rigor and scale on top of it.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#195

Post by qwerty456127 »

Sahhaese wrote: post #173
qwerty456127 wrote: post #154

I can hardly imagine what is that which is easy in Excel but hard in Python with Pandas and SqliteiteAlchemy/Pytable/whatever and matplotlib. What really annoys me in Excel is they won't replace the fossil VBA with Python, F# or a new language designed from scratch right for this. The VBA environment feels fun to touch to have the feeling of time-travelling back to the years of your childhood but it feels quite clums…

You lack imagination. I'm a professional software developer and I open excel every day. Let's say someone emails me a list of figures and I want to quickly add them up? Sure, I could write an incantation in awk but I can't then see if it's wrong because maybe on one row they 'accidentally' put an extra blank column in before the number by marking it with a letter, or there being an extra tab or whatever might cause t…

Sure, but he wrote something was a way to difficult to program while easy in Excel.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#196

Post by ashutoshclappia »

We were building our zero code app creation service and we also faced the situation where the users needed to add complex logic, calculations etc. and creating separate draggable modules and buttons for every requirement would not really solve the problem.

So we added draggable blocks and provided autogenerated variables for all elements just like the cell number in Excel. For all complex logic and calculations, the users can simply write a formula the way they write in Excel and complex apps can now be created without any coding language.

We also have huge respect for Excel.

If you are interested, you can try our software here: https://clappia.com

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#197

Post by theclaw »

I agree, as someone who spent quite some time building fancy admin dashboards for our team, in my most recent project I chose to abandon this and just write an Excel exporter and importer so they could edit the data in a familiar tool. The flexibility of this was huge for our team - everyone in an office has some experience of Excel and they were more productive with it than they ever were with my previous data grids and clunky web based editors.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#198

Post by hef19898 »

rjtavares wrote: post #191
hef19898 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, I used to run European cross-docking ops, planning, inventory, forecasting, scheduling, in Excel back the day. Successfully scaled by 100% YoY for three years. Was quite a lot of fun. Issue I have with that approach is not using excel per se. It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). That and ov…

I feel like PowerBI is a good solution to overcome Excel's deficiencies while working well with Excel. It forces you to structure your data and define measures while being dyanamic, efficient and friendly to less structured inputs.

I have to give PowerBI a serious shot. We have it at my current place but nibody is really using so I need some spare time to dive into it. Now, the more I think about it, the combination of MS Office, Power BI and MS Dynamics with a shopfront from, say Shopify would make up a quite nice e-commerce set up.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#199

Post by TeMPOraL »

hef19898 wrote: post #123
halfeatenpie wrote: post #26

I work in critical infrastructure planning. My organization builds software in R, Python, and other programming languages customized for these major organizations. So many critical infrastructures, billions of dollars in planning, and just systems are built out of Excel. It's amazing. You'd assume something that services millions of people a day would have some more sophisticated and customized solution, but you're w…

So true, I used to run European cross-docking ops, planning, inventory, forecasting, scheduling, in Excel back the day. Successfully scaled by 100% YoY for three years. Was quite a lot of fun. Issue I have with that approach is not using excel per se. It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). That and ov…

> It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). (...) And circumventing existing systems with local offline spreadsheets just screws up everything.

I usually side with the circumventers on this one. This misbehavior happens for a reason, which usually is that it's impossible or infeasible to do the work with "proper" systems. Excel sheets on pendrives is what you get when people can't exchange data using "correct" software, or when people need to continuously iterate on the shape of the data set, while getting the schema changed in the "correct" system would involve a ticket to IT and 2 months of waiting.

I think instead of paying people for doing a job and then doing everything possible to make that job difficult, companies should embrace that people will work around any deficiencies of top-down systems, whether software or procedural. But I guess this tug-of-war exists since the time of first corporations.

Re: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)

#200

Post by jacquesm »

The spreadsheet is the original 'serverless' programming environment. It allows relatively untrained people to augment their brains to levels that they would otherwise definitely not achieve. This has obvious limitations but I still believe that the spreadsheet is the 'killer app' for all of computing, back when VisiCalc was first released the sales of small computers went up in an incredible way.
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