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

theguardian.com

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

#281

Post by rescbr »

chaostheory wrote: post #245
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.

It would be easier if they simply port their VBA runtime to WASM and call it a day.

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

#282

Post by croes »

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…

Excel problems and errors are everywhere too. Especially when data imports are necessary.

I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.

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

#283

Post by Spooky23 »

Karellen wrote: post #176
valar_m wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel users can make mistakes, therefore Excel spreadsheets can't be audited? Is that your point?

My point is that if Excel spreadsheets can be audited, practically speaking, why are these major errors going unnoticed all the time ? Edit: My contention is that spreadsheets are in fact, very opaque, and it is incredibly difficult to check that every part of a spreadsheet is actually doing what its users think it is supposed to be doing. Specifically, I posit that it is harder to check a spreadsheet, than it is to…

Sounds like you work well outside of the domain.

Auditors don’t show up to critique your formulas. They are looking at business processes, which means usually the data that flows between things. If it gets to the point where they are digging that deep, they have a finding and are trying to assess the severity.

Software, including major business systems are often fucked up. There are major companies using RPA software to robotically use excel to correct some fubar in Oracle financials that wont get fixed for a few years.

The beauty of excel is that the business speaks it.

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

#284

Post by Spooky23 »

LikesPwsh wrote: post #188
foobiekr wrote: post #151

Earlier 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.

CSV is a simple data interchange format. Better than excel in that context.

PDF is the canonical way to preserve formatting where that is important. A court document electronically filed in PDF in 1999 is identically rendered today. The source .doc or WordPerfect file is not.

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

#285

Post by deepspace »

whall6 wrote: post #157
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…

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…

> 60 year old CFO

As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.

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

#286

Post by fragmede »

leptons wrote: post #261
fragmede wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

Sure, nine is a lot, but your comment says "more than 1 font". Without arguing the semantics of what you meant by "font", hopefully using different font sizes and emphasis (bold/italics) do make sense to you. If those make sense, then using a different font entirely shouldn't be too complicated to see as a feature that an Excel user who's not using it for graphics design reasonably want.

Legibility is an important consideration, and with Excel, the size of sheets tend to grow until there are too many columns. So now you have the normal regular size font and you use a different font that's more legible at small sizes, especially when rotated 90.

There have been umpteen attempts to replace Excel. User interviews to understand how customers actually use the tool are important. Having the hubris to say customers are doing it wrong without even bothering to understand their use case is the first step to failing at replacing Excel.

Don't get me wrong, I cringe every time I fire up a spreadsheet and it grows past a reasonable size or length of use, or any number of shortcomings. Sometimes I even switch tools or write my own when that happens but lately I find Airtable's a pretty good replacement for most human (aka not finance) use of spreadsheets.

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

#287

Post by ekianjo »

s0rce wrote: post #279
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…

I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.

Excel sheets are built visually so there is absolutely no sane way to parse them. Just the same thing as trying to restructure a pdf at the end of the day.

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

#288

Post by analog31 »

s0rce wrote: post #279
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…

I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.

I wrote a VB macro that displays the formula for a cell, next to the cell. Granted you have to add a cell (typically a column) to make space for it. It returns either a formula, or "constant" if the cell doesn't contain a formula. I could make it more sophisticated, but just those two things are enough to make spreadsheets a lot easier for me to follow.

Following spreadsheets is like trying to find something in my garage if all of the boxes have lids. But if the boxes are all open, I can find stuff in a jiffy, even if the boxes are disorganized.

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

#289

Post by majormajor »

Karellen wrote: post #176
valar_m wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel users can make mistakes, therefore Excel spreadsheets can't be audited? Is that your point?

My point is that if Excel spreadsheets can be audited, practically speaking, why are these major errors going unnoticed all the time ? Edit: My contention is that spreadsheets are in fact, very opaque, and it is incredibly difficult to check that every part of a spreadsheet is actually doing what its users think it is supposed to be doing. Specifically, I posit that it is harder to check a spreadsheet, than it is to…

> Specifically, I posit that it is harder to check a spreadsheet, than it is to check a "traditional" program in a normal programming language, which works on pure data.

I don't think I can agree with this. The average codebase I see is pretty terrible readability-wise. Nasty levels of function nesting, tons of variation of behavior based on arguments passed into functions, etc. I assume the average Excel spreadsheet is also pretty nasty, but it has the advantage of having a debugger "built in" vs looking at the code generally without actually seeing the data flowing through it (e.g. who runs every code review they do through a debugger?).

I also think this ignores that a "traditional" program replacing Excel would still need to get data from somewhere, which commonly implies a SQL database or a data warehouse that speaks SQL these days, and complex SQL is itself NASTY to verify/fully grok through reading alone.

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

#290

Post by danielmarkbruce »

deepspace wrote: post #285
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…

> 60 year old CFO As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.

it's more that a 60 yo has likely being using excel for 40 years and (almost certainly rightly) not interested in something else to model a business.
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