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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

#291

Post by deafpolygon »

ianand wrote: post #210
nradov wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good en…

Google Sheets does struggle past a certain size. For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel. In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokeni…

In my case, it doesn't crash. But there tends to be visual formatting issues.

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

#292

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Karellen wrote: post #168
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 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...

Financials are auditable. Code is auditable. The fact that something can be audited doesn't mean it will be, or will be done well if done.

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

#293

Post by danielmarkbruce »

dilippkumar wrote: post #275
MegaDeKay wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Um, what then is the point of an auditor?

"guarantee" is the key word. If you get a security audit, the security auditor doesn't "guarantee" you code/application is secure.

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

#294

Post by fsckboy »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #100
fsckboy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces" every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same. so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each…

you can be very pedantic about it, but Excel has no problem with 8+ variations of font size, color, and formatting, and everyone outside of typeface designers and newspaper men references typefaces as "the font".

you can't attempt to decipher the error message without knowing the distinctions, and listen to you getting all pedantic with the history of newspapermen etc. eyeroll.gif

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

#295

Post by danielmarkbruce »

zwarag wrote: post #72
ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better. One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the in…

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this. How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budge…

Once you go down the relational path, it's really hard to get out of it (and I don't even think you should, I think you are right).

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

#296

Post by danielmarkbruce »

kenjackson wrote: post #76
zwarag wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this. How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budge…

Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets are good for? I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you’re doing.

It is nice to have a schema. Once you use schemas, it's hard to think otherwise. It feels gross.

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

#297

Post by fsckboy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #102
fsckboy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces" every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same. so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each…

> so, what you are calling “fonts” (Arial, Times) are actually called “typefaces” Excel (and standard Windows and Office – the two are still slightly different, I think – selector controls call typefaces “Fonts” in the selector control. That doesn’t mean it is using “Fonts” the same way in the error message, but…)

the reason font menus are called font menus and not typeface menus dates back to when computers used raster fonts and had limited memory. You didn't load typefaces, you loaded the typeface/size/styles that you needed and had memory for, literally the fonts. Since that's the language people learned, that's what's in the UI

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

#298

Post by danielmarkbruce »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #83
kenjackson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets are good for? I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you’re doing.

Maybe if you have millions of rows you might have trouble with excel. Other than that, from a data storage perspective an Excel is just a database that’s human readable.

Not really. It generally won't have a schema. You generally can't write queries against it.

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

#299

Post by accrual »

analog31 wrote: post #288
s0rce wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ga…

The closed toolbox is a nice analogy for opening a sheet full of numbers. A foreign Excel sheet can take a lot of clicking around to get an idea of how it works sometimes.

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

#300

Post by wwweston »

pessimizer wrote: post #242
wwweston wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. Spreadsheets are code. Their user-facing side is a particular form of livecode oriented around "sheets"/2D arrays of data tightly connected with reactive code -- which definitely has some legibility advantages -- but they're code. Auditability is legibility. The advantages help. But also the reasons why Excel code is legible to auditors…

I don't think you get it. They can just click around and see all of the numbers and all of the formulas. You can write notes and directions into the spreadsheet to explain what it's doing. It's code and a UI . Everybody knows it's code, I've written thousands of lines of code to back single spreadsheets. But the output is always a spreadsheet that people can flip through and check the calculations themselves if they…

> I don't think you get it. They can just click around and see all of the numbers and all of the formulas. It's code and a UI.

I'm glad you apparently agree with my statements like "Their user-facing side is a particular form of livecode oriented around "sheets"/2D arrays of data tightly connected with reactive code -- which definitely has some legibility advantages," though that agreement does make it a bit strange to lead with "I don't think you get it."

> Everybody knows it's code

When someone enters the statement "Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code" into the discussion -- or in other words saying that an Excel spreadsheet is not code (along with asserting that's why auditors can understand it) -- apparently not everyone does know this and so it's reasonable to reassert that a spreadsheet is made of code.

> people can flip through and check the calculations themselves if they like.

If, as in any other interpreter, they understand the spreadsheet code that's being interpreted and take the time to follow what it's doing. And that's one reason why the observation that spreadsheets are code can be helpful. The distinctive visual presentation and model of spreadsheets is a legibility convenience for sure, but it can also lull people into believing they're working with something less complex than code. It helps people keep in mind that what the spreadsheet appears to be doing may different from what it's actually doing, either because the complexity has pushed it beyond casual legibility (a common problem in all kinds of code), or perhaps because someone intentionally is using the full power of an interpreted functional reactive programming language (to say nothing of VBA macros) to intentionally hide some aspect of the spreadsheet's operations. It helps people keep in mind that whatever margin of accessibility Excel's affordances provide, it still requires some of the same kind of work to audit it that other forms of code would.

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