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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

#201

Post by lupire »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #172
Karellen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel spreadsheets are auditable? If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them? https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa... https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...

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.

If it can be done, but not done right, that's not a big win (except in an arbitrary legal regulatory sense) than something that can be done. (And of course software "can be audited" too, by a different professional.)

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

#202

Post by thfuran »

ryoshu wrote: post #191
remus wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not generally, no.

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

#203

Post by jimnotgym »

candiddevmike wrote: post #123
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…

I would temper your hot take. Nothing you described is a feature specific to Excel from what I can tell, and using Excel in front of an ERP is most likely an anti-pattern as the ERP is meant to handle reporting and authorization in a centralized way.

Ha ha ha

The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up?

But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?

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

#204

Post by motohagiography »

most people in tech don't get what Excel is imo. start with the idea that it's a fully featured virtual machine that uses a different interface metaphor than a command line or windowing. it's useful to think of it as an abstraction layer where business runs, it's where value is demonstrated. those user spreadsheets are computers/hosts/vms and I'd argue that's often the disconnect between what technologists think they are supporting and what users think should be supported.

of course custom code is better at pretty much anything. I've been a unix user since the bsdi days and so to me spreadsheets are a cruel toy running in a blue tinted mental prison, but when you see excel as a different and sophisticated UX metaphor for a fully featured machine that the user uses for raw arithmetic computation, and as an alternative to a command line or a browser, it's much easier to respect. that's absolutely essential for understanding it and its users.

the thing about excel is if you don't use it i guarantee you work for someone who does as the tabular metaphor is the system of the world. even if reality is more complex and needs more complex objects to model it, human beings ultimately organize around the contents of spreadsheets. hand wavy, but I don't know how else to tell developers and product people they need to take excel seriously.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

Karellen wrote: post #176
valar_m wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel users can make mistakes, therefore Excel spreadsheets can't be audited? Is that your point?

My point is that if Excel spreadsheets can be audited, practically speaking, why are these major errors going unnoticed all the time ? Edit: My contention is that spreadsheets are in fact, very opaque, and it is incredibly difficult to check that every part of a spreadsheet is actually doing what its users think it is supposed to be doing. Specifically, I posit that it is harder to check a spreadsheet, than it is to…

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by jimnotgym »

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.

Then the auditor should ask you to prove it another way. You may think you hoodwinked them, but don't be so sure that they didn't build their own model to check your work... They do this all the time when people say 'I don't know how it works, the ERP calculates it.'

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

#207

Post by Karellen »

jimnotgym wrote: post #185
Karellen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel spreadsheets are auditable? If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them? https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa... https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...

Because there are so many spreadsheets? My team probably created 100 last week. Now think of 100 pieces of software that you are confident are 100% error free?

> Because there are so many spreadsheets?

The studies show the percentage of spreadsheets with errors in. Unless you have a reason to suspect this is not independent of the number of spreadsheets, I'm not sure what your point is?

> Now think of 100 pieces of software that you are confident are 100% error free?

Because software is either buggy or not buggy? And measurements like "defect rate" (e.g. defects/kloc) and "bug severity" do not exist? Come on.

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

#208

Post by alwillis »

jimnotgym wrote: post #95
alwillis wrote: post #92

I use Numbers for my day-to-day spreadsheet stuff, part of Apple's iWork suite with Pages and Keynote. The UI/UX is so much better than Excel's and you can export to .xlsx format. Don't get me wrong--there are some projects that require the functionality that Excel has. Using it gives me 90's software PTSD but sometimes you have no choice.

And what do you do for a living may I ask? Accountant, Actuary, trader? I only ask if you are using some of the advanced features, which is where the others start to fall away. Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure

> Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure

Don't be fooled by the marketing—Numbers has 90% of Excel's core functions; it even had RegEx before Excel did. IMHO, Numbers UI/UX is dramatically better than Excel's.

Of course, it doesn't have Excel's advanced features or access to plugins or to Python scripts. The users who need that know they need Excel… but you can go surprisingly far with Numbers.

Like I originally said, there are some tasks where you absolutely need Excel.

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

#209

Post by foobiekr »

LikesPwsh wrote: post #188
foobiekr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

neither of those are useful for the next stage of analysis.

Csv is much more useful than Excel. Pdf is much less useful.

Only if the thing consuming it can consume formulas.

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

#210

Post by ianand »

nradov wrote: post #170
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…

And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good en…

Google Sheets does struggle past a certain size.

For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel.

In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization.

That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson.

I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).

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