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'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

theguardian.com

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Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#191

Post by ryoshu »

remus wrote: post #189
MegaDeKay wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much. In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.

While it's true that an auditor can look at an excel spreadsheet, my experience is that they'll never really understand what's happening for anything more than the most basic spreadsheets. It's far too easy to build a spreadsheet that's completely inscrutable, and you end up with an audit that's very shallow.

That's generally by design.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#192

Post by jimnotgym »

oneplane wrote: post #130
jimnotgym wrote: post #114

I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets. Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad. You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good. The killer f…

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small. In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps wher…

I think you misunderstand 'workflows' in business. This is not a case of ingesting a large amount of data, transform, analyse etc.

A normal finance team gets constant one off requests for information. Download something from the ERP, lookup against something else, pivot it by department. Then you get a follow up for the same but with x excluded, but they need it in 10 minutes before a meeting. Excel is great for that.

Then there are the dozens of files behind accounting records. Take a Fixed Asset Register (since it is at the top of the balance sheet), a list of your assets and their depreciation schedule. Maybe your ERP doesn't have one, or your company didn't buy that module, or you have a special class off asset that doesn't fit in it. Maybe they coded it for one country, but in your country the rules are different, so it ends up in Excel.

Then maybe you have a bank account and you have cheques that are posted to your ledger but have not cleared the actual bank yet. Then you have items on your real account that you couldn't post yet, maybe someone paid you with no reference. So you keep a little Excel reconciliation to check.

Then inventory, maybe the ERP didn't split it in the way your consolidation needs it, so you transform the data in Excel and reconcile it back

Then you have all the things that belong in this accounting period but haven't been billed yet, so you have a running list of accruals and when they will reverse. Then you have all the things that are posted in this period but relate to later periods, so you keep a prepayments file. Maybe both of these spit out a journal to upload back to the ERP and reconcile the balance.

Then you get a download of the payroll for the month, but you need to rearrange it into net pay, gross pay, taxes paid by the employee, taxes paid by the employer, pension contributions... then you have to split it by cost centre too. This could be coded, but it is different in every country... and the cost centres keep changing, and the analysis head office wants keeps changing... so it goes in Excel.

Then I want to verify that the system posted the correct absorption to inventory, so I paste in an inventory report and a TB and last month's reconciliation updates.

I can code, but I can't maintain 100 pieces of software that change all the time. I also need all the people in the chain to be able to follow it....

And yes, finance people know how to apply the famous 'checks and balances' to keep out most classes of mistakes....and to detect the same mistakes made by the engineered 'proper software' we have to work with.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#193

Post by ChicagoDave »

jayd16 wrote: post #119
codethief wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand. Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?

Presumably they're talking about paying down more of the principle sooner, lowering the interest amounts.

Take any loan/credit and stretch it out until it’s paid off under the current parameters. You can calculate total interest paid.

Now add an extra column to pay extra (against the principal).

Now calculate total interest paid. Save this separately.

Now the fun part. Go back to the original and adjust the interest rate until the total interest paid is the same as the adjusted version.

You just found a way to reduce your interest “rate”.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#194

Post by kichimi »

leptons wrote: post #89
standardUser wrote: post #6

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known prob…

I can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

I feel like this is a pretty important thing for the technically minded to get their heads around.

Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#195

Post by game_the0ry »

I worked in finance professionally for 7 years before I started writing code for money, so I would say I am very familiar with the tool.

For the specific set of problems it is designed to solve, its like shooting the best sniper rifle ever made -- point, calibrate, pull trigger, win.

For any other problems outside of its scope, its like trying to break the world record for Nurburgring while driving a short bus.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#196

Post by ChicagoDave »

owenmarshall wrote: post #122
lostlogin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I balance my checking account Assuming that this relates to checks/cheques, are they going away in the US?

“Balancing a checking account” in American vernacular is typically used to mean reconciling the transactions your bank has posted to the spend you’ve tracked. This used to be more important when you wrote paper checks and received a monthly paper statement from your bank. Most people who “balance” their accounts today seem primarily concerned that they are adhering to their personal budget. But the term remains.

This was my meaning. It’s all about adhering to a budget and seeing it going forward.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#197

Post by grvbck »

onionisafruit wrote: post #33
cendyne wrote: post #19

There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.

Soon after I started my first IT job, my boss had me fill out a spreadsheet with everybody’s local desktop password so we could do updates when they aren’t around. It was a very awkward week asking people for their passwords. That was almost 30 years ago, and I still remember a few people’s passwords.

Then we had fiber (FTTH) installed in my building, the installation company delivering the routers wrote everybody's router username, password and SSID with a whiteboard marker on the outside of the door, "to make the installation easier for the technicians".

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#198

Post by ChicagoDave »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #81
ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better. One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the in…

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

If you do any serious financial planning for a startup or small business, Excel is vastly superior to Google Sheets. The multi sheet formulas can get very complicated and web based tools can’t perform as well as desktop software.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#200

Post by jimnotgym »

oneplane wrote: post #154
lolinder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). ... It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is. This is a…

> This is an elitist software engineer's take. No it isn't. This is MY take and I'm not an elitist software engineer. > People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. No, it isn't. It is human behaviour alright, but it's cutting corners because it feels better to do what you already know instead of doing what was instructed. This is…

>Example: if you need to visualise your data from multiple sources company-wide, we'd have Tableau (and training, access, templates, portals etc) for example. That means you do it there as per instruction, and you don't go trying to setup some home-brew graph in excel that you manually regenerate every day and forget to generate when you are on vacation.

Then your CFO calls up and says, 'I have a meeting in 30 minutes, can you tell me the total cost of pensions for people who work out of the Singapore office on sales admin' and the BI developer never pulled the measures through for that, because nobody asked for it before... so you export it to Excel, do an xlookup, a sumif and a filter and keep your job...or put a request into IT to have it added, wait 3 weeks, and get fired.

In the real world there are measures repeated week after week, and there are many more ad-hoc requests. Your mental model of the information required to run a business is way off.

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