31–40 of 435 posts
"Tell Staffs" really I am a dyslexic and even I wouldn't make such a trivial mistake with plural /singular.
I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons - excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc - speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying - analysis: It's ea…
All outputs were generated by a .Net application generating read-only Excel spreadsheets (which might have 30 tabs and up to 15,000 values on a tab) - was done this way to meet the very complex reporting requirements. All the ~20 report packs in the company were produced with one click in a simple web app.
Ah-hoc querying of Hyperion was done from Excel using the SmartView plugin.
The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…
A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build processes would probably create more than a billion dollars of real value every year with even limited adoption.
While it may be true that Excel is overused, I believe that the spreadsheet is chronically underused as a model for software development.
> A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes. Then I believe it should say stop abusing Excel. Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate…
And the premise that things have changed enough to warrant reevaluating worn out business processes like Mr. Bell's here is true enough.
But dumping a tool because some out of touch C-level tool says so is a recipe for huge traction loss.
I mean ... people that use nail-guns for a living still have to use hammers.
I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…
We recommended they implement a PDM (product data management) system - it would have saved them millions of dollars (considering they had a staff of 20 whose sole job was to update the claims processing system by hand based on these spreadsheets.) Unfortunately when the 2008 financial crisis happened, management balked at the initial outlay. It's quite possible they're still using Excel to this day.
What should we use, then? I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data. After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on tha…
What I like to call the product is "excel on steroids".
You can check it at www.ninoxdb.de.
I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…
I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…
My dad brought home an IBM PC in 82, using Multiplan for chemical mixing calculations. He thought it was the cat’s meow. Though Multiplan was the predecessor to Excel, the spreadsheet had been out since late 70’s.