261–270 of 377 posts
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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.
You're pretty sure it's the wrong tool, but you can't imagine a use case for a fairly basic feature of said tool? Why do I now doubt your assertion?
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Which 'opinion' would that be. The one where I write about anecdotes from the real world? We have software that does what is needed. An ERP, a CRM, a HMI, a case management system for legal etc. No need to have everyone on every team rebuild that in excel.
That all iterate too slowly and don’t put the development in the hands of the people doing the job. Excel is near universal and flexible. It’s not a hammer. It’s a swiss army knife.
If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel.
The same goes for collaborating with 100 people outside of your team, they are not going to keep tracking your personal DIY projects, they work with a common infrastructure so it's actually feasible to work instead of being busy playing engineer all day.
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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?
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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 h…
I'm guessing your company is somewhat more homogeneous than us conglomerates?
Edit: no it is not an ERP problem. It is a people problem. The team simply can't scope out the new factories quickly enough before the business changes something. Often the newly acquired factory has a different costing method for instance, and lots of data has to be collected before they can go on the master ERP. This may involve, for instance, timing every products build, collating and verifying it (in Excel probably), before the implementation can progress. This can take months. Especially when.... three main priority is selling stuff, rather than having neat BI
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That's great, but has little to do with the 'excel is my hammer, therefore everything is an excel-shaped nail' problem. Sure, like I wrote (twice already), you might need to have some malleable rows in front of you on your local workstation for some ephemeral work. But the actual workflow happens in the ERP system. Or the CRM. Or the PIM system. Or in Tableau. Or Databricks. And my beef is with people who think their…
I love that you mentioned PIM systems. I've worked with product information systems from small 3-man companies all the way to Fortune 500 companies, and without exception, their PIM systems have been total dogshit: slow, extremely unintuitive, limited in functionality and borderline unusable. When I need a list of product names, barcodes, weight and dimensions, nothing beats a simple Excel table that can be quickly t…
Luckily for us, we put request-response time in the requirements documents, so our PIM users get sub-50ms responses for everything.
As for sharing data, our manufacturers and subcontractors use APIs (with the exception of some wanting JSON uploads via SFTP), most of them stream directly into their PIM or ERP (yes, some don't have dedicated PIM systems and just use their ERP for that).
Even if we could have the data flow through individual workstations, we'd still not do that as we don't want to legal and repetitional risk associated with that, especially since it is completely avoidable.
As written in a different reply, sometimes people want to do some local fiddling around and they will export some data. But that data is considered expired, and not part of the normal data flow. Which was my point: spreadsheets are never part of the main loop. And anyone who wants to build a system where it is, is not working for us.
I do notice a trend here, lots of people having bad systems (slow PIM, outdated ERP, missing CRM), which is probably something that should be fixed, rather than taking the shadow route. Escaping to a spreadsheet is just that: escaping.
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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…
Write a piece of software that ends Excel’s dominance and then I will take your opinion seriously. I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.
30% of my jobs when I was in integration was unfucking folders of folders of irregular xls built by users, and sometimes we just failed due to the sheer amount of crap which was in motion and had to be transitioned atomically. It never worked first and second time, so we had to do waves of complex transitions with parallel accounting (double workload on an already suffocating business), until things failed rarely enough to be scheduled as regular bug fixing tasks.
The managers use Excel, as one might expect, although at this point it might be equally accurate to say "spreadsheets" generically. I'm not sure how many of them use advanced features that are unique to Excel. They will use the one with the least friction. With that said, Excel probably still has the most finely tuned UI.
The traditional engineers use Excel. Very few of them program. The ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, have joined the software industry. The rest are pretty adamant that programming won't get the job done quicker or more reliably than Excel.
The software engineers use Excel. They're good at whatever their role is within the software team, but they use Excel for the same kinds of short-term or one-off problem solving that everybody else uses it for.
Do some spreadsheets get too big and unwieldy for their own good? Sure. But that would also be true if you let the managers and traditional engineers write their own code for solving the same kinds of problems. I know this because I write that kind of code. Nothing will ever bridge the gap between small and large projects, that exists in most mature organizations.
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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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That all iterate too slowly and don’t put the development in the hands of the people doing the job. Excel is near universal and flexible. It’s not a hammer. It’s a swiss army knife.
You make it sound like their job is development (it's not). If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel. The same goes for collaborating with 100 people outside of your team, they are not going to keep tracking your personal DIY projects, they work with a common infrastructure so it's actually feasible to work instead of being busy pla…
EDIT: I think my experience could likely be in a situation very different to yours. Thinking about it more deeply I am describing an org up to its neck in tech debt and in a changing market where regulation is tighter than ever.
So, I think the pathologies are definitely more specific than universal.
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 need you to explain why those other tools are like notepad instead of just another IDE. Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct. (And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)