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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

timharford.com

281–282 of 282 posts

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

heh, your exchange looked pretty much like a holywar between programmers. Except problems looked like if you're discussing merits of different old varieties of BASIC, with GOTO and line numbers. I really don't see how excel is more visual, or easier to grasp after adding just a several columns of data or formulas.

I wonder if there could be made some middleground language, visual enough to not being scary for spreadsheet people, and debuggable and readable enough to not become a mess when model becomes big. Jupyter comes to mind, but it looks like it didn't get any traction outside data science.

Re: The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

#282
post #4

Spreadsheets are a hammer so if that's all you know then all problems look like the nail. Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start, but there are many options better than Excel for critical systems.

Spreadsheets are great. I just wish folks would use a more appropriate tool for what they really want: a very light-touch database. Something like Airtable is perfect for structuring a bit of data into rows and columns. But, nothing beats the availability (both of sharing and editing) of an open Google Sheet.

And then there's the pricing.. "We already have Google". No way my company would pay for Airtable, Notion, etc

Its spreadsheets all the way.

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