Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Excel is king of cancer that you’ll implore to cut out once you realize it slowly kills your business. A perfect trap for novice entrepreneurs. 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…
'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
271–280 of 377 posts
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt I misunderstand it since this is what I get paid for. I'm also not suggesting this is a case of large data, ETL or anything like that. (what I'm writing about is people using it for that anyway which is what we have other systems for and they should not be doing that) Our finance teams use excel too, but not as the 'do everything' tool that the article and plenty of comments here makes it out to be. They use…
> While we primarily deal with Dynamics (AX and 365), pretty much everything fits in there I don't have much experience with Dynamics. My experience is mostly Oracle, SAP and Netsuite plus some bespoke. I agree modern systems are very flexible. Everything could fit in there eventually if you are willing to pay, and willing to wait. But reporting can't wait. The company I work for has 1000 factories, many sales office…
The previous setup was all SAP, but that was too slow and we couldn't get the change rate we wanted. That was over 10 years ago, and AX had different issues but at least nothing the end-users have to deal with.
Besides AX and 365 we have 3 more, as well as some legacy processes still using MSBI, but all of the data going in and data going out is captured (either in Databricks or in our integration systems) which means that reporting and things like invoicing, banking, purchasing etc doesn't really care much about the underlying ERP. The ERP core team of course does, but the days where most of the work was serving direct business day-to-day needs are long gone, it's mostly edge cases and keeping the ERP in line with business changes.
All the metrics are processed in spark and exposed to both Tableau (together with an SQL Warehouse that lets you access all the individual data as well), and Thanos. So if a technical team wants to do some deeper analysis side-by-side with technical data that's possible too (which is great since they tend to be more comfortable with that vs. tableau). It's pretty nice to have financial data, WSSI data, GTM data and service deployment data overlaid so you can see the direct impact of everything on everything. (even if the resolution for some data is not the same - zoom out enough and you get very actionable insights)
Perhaps one of the differences is what we are mainly in retail, warehousing and logistics, when we buy a product or services business we tend to ditch everything except the data and the people. Our data engineering team takes care of the capture and transformation and the respective specialised process teams (CRM, ERP, PIM, fulfilment etc) coordinate from the business, legal and operational perspective. There will be a cutoff date and depending on the size we'll either have had a realtime streaming period (CDC style mainly) or do a one-off snapshot of the business and do it in one go.
For our business users it means they won't need to go to a secondary system to get the 'other' data; instead, the data comes to them.
I'm not sure why this method has not failed yet, I suspect it's because some M&A strategy components outline the cost/benefit clear enough to not have us integrate something that is not integrate-able.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Except without a way to get the computer to behave the way they want they have an arm strung behind their back in the modern economy. 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…
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#275Earlier 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.
Um, what then is the point of an auditor?
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel is king of cancer that you’ll implore to cut out once you realize it slowly kills your business. A perfect trap for novice entrepreneurs. 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…
How did you fix the user habits in the end?
Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
See my other comment, we have over 1000 factories in many countries. 23 different ERPs in my division alone apparently. They are constantly trying to standardise, but acquisitions happen faster than factory ERP implementations. When you acquire a group that isn't standardised itself you have even more systems. That is one reason why complex groups use consolidation systems. I'm guessing your company is somewhat more…
We are not a conglomerate of 10+ nation size (slightly below that; also not the best measure but trying to toe the line with sharing but not naming gets harder with detail) but I suppose since we had to pivot from financial services to CPG a while ago and B2C retail in our segment at that time really demanded extremely low lag&lead-times for user changes and onboarding of products and services (well, VAS.. but who's counting), we engineered our way out of it, including logistics, SCADA, web, mobile apps, people-onboarding and M&A onboarding.
Having neat BI is more a side-effect than a primary goal. That goal came much later since it was the last remaining driver of shadow processes as it lead to many opportunities of bad engineering, even if it was seen as valuable in the short term (it never was worth it in the long run). It wasn't even about spreadsheets (or excel specifically), it became a real-time streaming issue where you couldn't have a fully manual process in the loop any more and we couldn't hire extra people fast enough to keep the existing processes running at the rate we needed. We don't have data entry positions anymore for the same reason; it's not that we don't receive new data, it's just that we had all B2B contacts agree that they will not send or receive files between humans if it's regarding an automated streaming process.
Having our data architecture being based on real time streaming (and some periodic sanity checks and shadow reconciliation as that is mandated by some record keeping laws) means we beat practically everyone in the same market segment on speed and delivery.
But perhaps this ties in to us being more homogeneous than some other conglomerates. We're not doing more than 5 countries and don't have our acquisitions result in extra divisions as we tend to aim for competitors in the segments we want to grow in (we want the data, the people and the customers, not the systems). This means that the people that operate the business (be it the business processes or the actual product processes) don't really get 'extra' software as a result.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#278Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#279I 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…
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…
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#280Earlier 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.
I also cannot contain formulas. Only data.
If your process can read and write to Excel it is a much better defined format.