'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by throwaway2037 » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 7:48 AM UTC

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.

What is wrong with VBA? Aside from a few syntax quirks, like no short circuits in if statements, it is a very easy language to learn and use. And, the syntax hinting (IntelliSense?) is incredible.

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

#322

Post by listenallyall » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 7:55 AM UTC

wruza wrote: post #276

Affric wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you fix the user habits in the end?

I don’t think it’s fixable. Excel enables chaotic “development” and it just happens. In the end we either left them with a system they ordered or bailed out cause it wasn’t worth it. 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.

And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.

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

#323

Post by wkat4242 » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 8:42 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #287

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.

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.

Yeah this is what Microsoft is trying to do with copilot.

But they couldn't figure it out either so it's limited to data formatted as table.

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

#324

Post by wkat4242 » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 8:43 AM UTC

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…

Well it might be replaced by another spreadsheet. Maybe one that does actual innovation. I don't think people in the 80s ever thought that Lotus 1-2-3 would go away.

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

#325

Post by snapcaster » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:02 AM UTC

elmerfud wrote: post #124

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…

Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply be…

The problem is that most of the time what software engineers say is "better" just isn't.

Suddenly instead of being comfortable using the tool themselves, they have to request engineer time to update the UI. Instead of being able to write whatever weird excel formulas they have they maybe now need to learn SQL. Maybe they "should" but that is kind of besides the point

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

#326

Post by afiori » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:05 AM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #192

oneplane wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small. In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps wher…

I think you misunderstand 'workflows' in business. This is not a case of ingesting a large amount of data, transform, analyse etc. A normal finance team gets constant one off requests for information. Download something from the ERP, lookup against something else, pivot it by department. Then you get a follow up for the same but with x excluded, but they need it in 10 minutes before a meeting. Excel is great for that…

I short in many places the computer is still a human

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

#327

Post by afiori » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:14 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #148

oneplane wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small. In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps wher…

> Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). ... It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is. This is a…

> I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable.

I my uninformed opinion it is because SOP (spreadsheet oriented programming) is as different from other paradigms as Forth is from Java. Decades of tribal fights have sort of culminated in a vague "all Software Engineering is Software Engineering" where most people understand that there are benefits even in the paradigms/languages they do not like.

In another world Excel would be just another one of those paradigms/languages but in this world it did not partecipate in the "Sotware Civil Wars" and so it was left out of the respectability plateau.

In short it is not that excel is bad but rather that the cultural link between it and what we usually call programming is very weak

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

#328

Post by jimnotgym » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:14 AM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #272

jimnotgym wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We also consolidated from multiple systems but we never had that many in parallel, we always were finished in time before adding/splitting the next set. 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 legac…

>Perhaps one of the differences is what we are mainly in retail, warehousing and logistics

You nailed it. At a previous firm (when I was in charge of ERP as well) we took over these kind of firms and moved them into our ERP either immediately or after a few weeks.

Manufacturing is orders of magnitude more complex. BOMS, Routings, all the raw and intermediate level skus, interfacing with the shop floor equipment. The much more complex accounts, many more people to train in more specialisms. MRP is so much more complex, planning is more complex.

Then with our 1000s of business units... the Politics is so much more complex too

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

#329

Post by jimnotgym » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:21 AM UTC

alwillis wrote: post #208

jimnotgym wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you do for a living may I ask? Accountant, Actuary, trader? I only ask if you are using some of the advanced features, which is where the others start to fall away. Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure

> Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure Don't be fooled by the marketing—Numbers has 90% of Excel's core functions; it even had RegEx before Excel did. IMHO, Numbers UI/UX is dramatically better than Excel's. Of course, it doesn't have Excel's advanced features or access to plugins or to Python scripts. The users who need that know they need Excel… but you can go surprisingly…

Does Numbers run well on a PC?

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

#330

Post by Karellen » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #289

Karellen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My main problems with checking spreadsheet code are:

1) Code formatting - spreadsheet formulae are generally presented all on one line with minimal spacing and no syntax highlighting. Any mildly complex formula should ideally be presented a) across multiple lines, b) with indenting to show function nesting depth, and c) in colour.

2) Copy and paste - spreadsheet formulae are generally copy-and-pasted every time they're used (i.e. on every row), rather than being defined once and referenced in each place they're used. Some spreadsheets are now good at highlighting if one formula is out of place in a column of otherwise-similar formulae, but it's hard to check if formulae are supposed to be "the same" in different columns, or different worksheets, or in different spreadsheet files.