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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

timharford.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#271

Post by LordEthano »

clausok wrote: post #268
Closi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well investment bankers tend to be pretty good at excel > This is how I can tell you have never seriously worked in excel. Ah, so the style guide and best practice is based on “Trust me - I rock and you suck”. I can guarantee that I do use excel seriously, and my personal experience is the exact opposite. You wouldn’t see beautiful code with variable names like A2, and it’s exactly the same for me with excel. Besid…

This debate about whether to use named-ranges in Excel formulas brings back some distant memories. I was on a team at Goldman Sachs that built Excel tools for the investment bankers and because of that we'd help out with the new banker Excel training held at the giant Chelsea Piers sports complex. Every year freshly minted MBA's would begin the training and immediately become aghast when the trainers told them to nev…

You put it in much better words than I could, thanks haha.

Also, very cool experience at Goldman!

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#272

Post by PeterisP »

CRConrad wrote: post #261
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of lousy Excel-driven processes is a big part of my current job. SQL only solves half the problem, though: Excel is also a tool for manual data-input and manipulation. To solve this piece you often need to create CRUD webapps, which can be much more complex to develop and maintain than some SQL in the database.

> To solve this piece you often need to create CRUD webapps, which can be much more complex to develop and maintain than some SQL in the database. Why do they need to be webapps? If you've done it with Excel so far, you're obviously on a LAN, so why not traditional client/server native apps?

Deployment and authentication is going to be a problem, but the big thing is that in many such environments users would simply not be able to execute your native client app on their controlled workstation by default. But for most software teams nowadays creating a CRUD webapp is simpler and cheaper than traditional client/server native apps; I've seen major companies maintain their existing client/server native apps but whenever they have the choice (e.g. greenfield development), they'd rather not have a native app because, frankly, there's no good reason to do so as the maintenance is much simpler if you don't have to worry about the deployed client instances.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#273

Post by pjmlp »

dgudkov wrote: post #255
monocasa wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Data transformations are inherently a pipeline/function abstraction, and even non-technical users understand that. Spreadsheets don't offer a good way to decompose a data transformation process and inspect each step for correctness. They absolutely give you that ability; you break the transformation across many cells. Spreadsheets are probably the most successful functional reactive programming paradigm set of lang…

>you break the transformation across many cells In theory, yes. But the reality, nobody does that unless an error is apparent and needs to be investigated. The vast majority of calculations in Excel spreadsheets are done using cumbersome, multi-line, unreadable formulas that try to pack as much logic as possible into one expression. Such obscure formulas are the main reason why lots of business-critical Excel spreads…

It is like programming, there are people that keep doing goto and methods that take two screens in Excel, and there are those that bothered to learn lambda, powerquery and addons.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#274

Post by pjmlp »

CRConrad wrote: post #258
nicoffeine wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel. Every time a business user…

> Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Sigh... "Microsoft has". Time was, spreadsheets was a generic category of software, made by lots of different software makers. Nowadays, it feels like people not only don't know this, but can hardly even conceive of the possibility that "spreadsheet" could mean something other than "Excel". At least I think that mo…

True, however Microsoft is not to blame for the management errors of others, and there are other spreadsheets on the market still.

Except instead of trying to be the C++ of Spredsheets, they target Go like capabilities, and then wonder why business keeps adopting Excel.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#275

Post by pjmlp »

reportgunner wrote: post #266
catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

It's called "VBA Macros"

Extended with Lambda, PowerQuery and AddOns.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#276

Post by pjmlp »

vxNsr wrote: post #115
gizmo686 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody had to pay for this fork Actually, everyone had to pay for that fork. Excel is a paid product, and isn't even included in the cost of Windows. It is, however, bundled with MS Office, which includes Word, which is even more of a must have at almost every single company/org.

I know very few people who have paid for excel specifically. everyone pays for MS office, albeit because it includes excel, but in an workplace setting the main thing you're paying for is outlook/exchange the fact that word/excel/powerpoint are bundled is a plus. The main point I'm making is that no one has to go to their manager and justify paying for it. It's already bought and paid for, and because of its ubiquity…

Even better, because some of those deals include MSDN, when Excel users grow beyond VBA, they just get VB.NET installed and keep doing AddOns in .NET.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#277

Post by pjmlp »

starik36 wrote: post #158
pillefitz wrote: post #156

What's your opinion on VBA? I have successfully used it to build quite complex applications (position management in trading) and found it fast, reliable and easy to develop in a fraction of the time it took me to build an Electron application.. I have a really hard time going back to modern JS frameworks after having been exposed to Excel..

If Microsoft would update the core VB language to be a bit more modern, I bet a lot more professional developers would descend upon it. As it stands now, it’s in limbo because you can’t use it in the web version of excel.

They introduced Lambda, M Code and PowerQuery instead.

I guess F# like is modern enough.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#278

Post by DataGata »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #182
catherd wrote: post #148

The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.

You can just spread the formula over multiple cells. Instead of A3: IF( , , ) where each of the three parameters are complex formulae, you can do: A3: IF(B3, C3, D3) B3: C3: D3: Not only is the formula now broken down into simpler chunks, you also get to inspect the component results (like watches in a breakpoint! sorta...). Then you can just hide the relevant columns if you like (B,C,D in this case). You can even us…

You say this but it still feels gross to do.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#279

Post by giraffe333 »

Why don't excel and all the things that can read excel kill the old xls (2^16 limit) format? I mean still let excel read the file, but don't allow changing the file. Only allow saving the old file to the new format.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#280

Post by codesnik »

eropple wrote: post #97
codesnik wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can see my workings How? Do they check that every cell in a column actually has the same formula? Do they check data format everywhere? Python script is something that is possible to be actually reviewed, and results - reproduced, and "formula's" there are actually readable. But for some stupid reason excel files are still shared over email.

It's only "stupid" if one suffers from a catastrophic lack of empathy for people who are not programmers and for the incentives to which they are exposed--which do not include using a software developer's preferred tools, nor do they include the carving out of time with which to learn them. I would hope that we would be generally wiser than that here.

Like being a "programmer" is some genetic trait or something, or like using excel in any more or less productive manner doesn't require carving out hell a lot of time, it's just that time is taken from user's lives in small pieces, and doing PROGRAMMING seems like taking a university course.

I actually have a lot of empathy for people who forced to deal with all those problems, otherwise I just wouldn't care.

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