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

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

#241

Post by goodlinks »

zwarag wrote: post #72
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…

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this. How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budge…

There are many ways to skin a cat, but my advice how to try it an excel way (assuming a db backgound) would be..

try dumber things, sounds stupid but you dont need rules and structure, just data :)

denormalise a more often to break down the problem, the data and problem are your goal not structure (as much as db).

Yes period per tab type of thing is quite common, as at some point you want to close the period and never change it.

Lean into the non-standardisation to handle the real world. E.g for most of your budget its one line per item per month but this one are flexes with headcount so that has its own page, and tax is balnced in month x so ill just over type all the formulae there when the real numbers come in.

Also if the model is complex try naming fields and showing the formula in a cell next to it to remind you how its calculated (if not ready using it check out "format as table" to do this for tabular data)

And yes pivot the crap out of everything.

There is also "add to model" which gives you powerbi type modelling in excel which can also be handy and fast.

Not extensive list, and for lots of things db is better when you know how to use it.. but those are some of the "i get it" scenarios for me

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

#242

Post by pessimizer »

wwweston wrote: post #227
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.

> Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. Spreadsheets are code. Their user-facing side is a particular form of livecode oriented around "sheets"/2D arrays of data tightly connected with reactive code -- which definitely has some legibility advantages -- but they're code. Auditability is legibility. The advantages help. But also the reasons why Excel code is legible to auditors…

I don't think you get it. They can just click around and see all of the numbers and all of the formulas. You can write notes and directions into the spreadsheet to explain what it's doing. It's code and a UI.

Everybody knows it's code, I've written thousands of lines of code to back single spreadsheets. But the output is always a spreadsheet that people can flip through and check the calculations themselves if they like. It's code that outputs code. But is that a helpful observation?

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

#243

Post by rezmason »

bigjump wrote: post #101

The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked! https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!

You're cleared for takeoff: https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg

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

#244

Post by oneplane »

jimnotgym wrote: post #234
oneplane wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world (which is where my example comes from) the CFO expects it in Tableau, all day, every day and isn't going to waste time on the phone with some random people who were assigned to put it in tableau. Perhaps you don't like this example, but that doesn't make it less real.

Ok. My real world counterpoint. I work for a CFO at a multinational. A really big one. I have been the finance lead at a multinational myself, a smaller one. Our business changes so rapidly that we are forever adding business units, acquiring, divesting, resizing. The ERP people are years behind us all of the time. What should we do in the mean time with our new group of companies we just acquired? Wait for the IT pe…

If your ERP can't keep up, then that is an ERP-shaped problem. Escalate with the CFO and CTO since the latter probably signed the responsibility/ownership (albeit probably indirectly) for delivery. In the mean time (since the real world is imperfect) you would of course rather kludge it than do nothing. But you would probably not rebuild the entire ERP in excel, forever, which is what I will fight against.

We don't have that problem, our ERP team can keep up. Perhaps that is because our rate of acquiring and divesting is maybe 2 or 3 cases per year. We are only active in a couple of countries per BU in the cases I write about, so that makes it easier as well.

On the other hand, if the ERP team isn't capable of producing the rate of change needed to support the business requirements, I really hope that you get that sorted since that is practically the entire reason an ERP team exists.

We do deploy changes (technical changes) about 200 times each day, of which the teams dealing directly with business workflows do about 60 (including some stock, pricing and WSSI teams). It's not a lot, but it allows us to have nearly no lag time between business needs and implementation delivery. It did take a while to get to that rate, and a 2-week feature freeze one time to shift all processes to a model that allows for this change rate. But it works well for us. (and reporting, visualisation, ETL, and ML are all done without spreadsheets for about 3 years now)

As for why we did that (in case that was a question you'd be asking since it is obviously not a change that costs nothing): we no longer wanted to accept the risk of doing it the old way, we also didn't want to have as much onboarding friction due to having many diverse sub-workflows inside teams, because even if you did learn about what someone DIY'ed in your local team, you will still run into the same problem ad-hoc when dealing with other teams, usually at the worst possible time. Same goes for off-boarding, we don't want to spend months trying to figure out what custom stuff someone put in place, especially since you get non-engineering solutions to engineering problems (the excel shaped one) but also engineering solutions to non-engineering problems (the python notebook one). We want our people to be able to spend as much of their time on the actual work instead of side quests that don't add the value we are looking for. It doesn't mean exploration or experiments are banned, but it does mean we want to facilitate as much as we can so you don't have to do anything extra by default.

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

#245

Post by chaostheory »

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…

The real problem isn’t with Excel itself. The problem is VBA and even Microsoft has been trying to kill it with JavaScript and future python support. I don’t feel that even MS can kill VBA since it’s so ubiquitous on Excel into the day that the majority of users transition to Excel online.

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

#247

Post by mp05 »

chaps wrote: post #161
whall6 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures. If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it. One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you…

Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.

I'm sure they were glad they had you to fix their problems!

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

#248

Post by pzmarzly »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #186
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? Tables.

Google Sheets has tables now https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/05/tables-in-go...

They seem much worse than Excel's though. Are structured references supported? Can the tables be moved without breaking references? It also seems to me that the filter views aren't implemented in the mobile apps yet, so you can end up with a PC-only document.

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

#249

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

foobiekr wrote: post #211
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...

Spreadsheets let you click any field and understand where it came from. Excel can be thought of as an amazing post-execution debugger where you can get a previous output and value for almost any piece of memory ("cell"). I would love a debugger that could do this post-execution for some output.

Not quite the same thing but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_debugging comes close.

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

#250

Post by kjellsbells »

Andrex wrote: post #229
gus_massa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Google Sheets instead of Excel since a few years, and the only feature I miss is Solver.

It's almost too easy to hit up https://sheets.new whenever I get an idea. Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer. I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time. https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png I don't think Excel offers anything like this.

I think your computer may have problems. I have a 5 year old Dell Latitude and Excel loads with a new sheet in under 2 seconds from cold. I have the excel on my taskbar so even triggering the launch is Win+2 and quick.

Excel on Mac is another ball of wax though. Bit of a dog, that.

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