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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

#331

Post by 3abiton »

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…

> the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures.

Can you give an example? I am unaware of such power.

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

#332

Post by abenga »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #193
jayd16 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably they're talking about paying down more of the principle sooner, lowering the interest amounts.

Take any loan/credit and stretch it out until it’s paid off under the current parameters. You can calculate total interest paid. Now add an extra column to pay extra (against the principal). Now calculate total interest paid. Save this separately. Now the fun part. Go back to the original and adjust the interest rate until the total interest paid is the same as the adjusted version. You just found a way to reduce you…

There is the "debt is bad" viewpoint, where paying your loan earlier is seen as a good thing, which is a valid way to look at it, depending on your values.

However, what you described can also be done this way: invest the extra payment amount elsewhere and get interest/capital gains on it, which gives you the lower effective interest rate and the extra liquidity as well. Or in other words, the figures on the spreadsheet need to reflect the opportunity cost of the extra payment, or the lower total interest paid is a misleading mirage.

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

#333

Post by rad_gruchalski »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #186
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? Tables.

Google Sheets has tables now https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/05/tables-in-go...

Cool. I have learned something new!

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

#334

Post by wruza »

listenallyall wrote: post #322
wruza wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure why you’re assuming the worst of me here.

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

#335

Post by fuzzfactor »

afiori wrote: post #199
LikesPwsh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Csv is much more useful than Excel. Pdf is much less useful.

can you make graphs in a CSV?

Not exactly, I like to graph "xSV" data as it is streaming in to the PC, with processing before displaying and filling the cells with the filtered data. You can choose which functions you want to apply before data hits the cells and let the cells do their magic after that. Pretty much a real-time live graph, other than a little latency.

After data collection (or during), then output can be made in any format you would like. In addition to what anybody would want to print right off the spreadsheet.

The XLS(X) file forms a database and UI, contains a copy of the input macros and output macros, and you save the whole thing every time which backs it all up (over and over and over again) in a form that anybody can open anywhere with a PC that only has Windows & Office. And whoever opens it will be right up to speed as good as they can be with whatever abilities they have using Excel alone.

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

#336

Post by LightBug1 »

smallerdemon wrote: post #5

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.

And us industry standard excel users hate when we send you Excel sheets (for a good reason) and then you use and edit them in .numbers, and then send them back as .numbers without a care in the world ... often we lose all the background goodness we built in (often designed to make your life easier!) ... you in the general sense ... calms shaking rage

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

#337

Post by fuzzfactor »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #147
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 reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming. If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?

I found different versions of Excel, and Excel in general, are less consistent ingesting XLS(X) files than tabulated text or well-crafted CSV's.

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

#338

Post by fuzzfactor »

croes wrote: post #282
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.

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

And people are aware of it but they don't know where the faults are and need to go forward anyway.

So they must act as if nothing could be wrong, and if something does come up later on it can be treated as a complete surprise to everyone concerned.

With that kind of acting, how about how far the bar has been lowered on even more critical decisions? :\

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

#339

Post by oneplane »

eviks wrote: post #307
oneplane wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. On top of that, we're also not going to have everyone do a little bit of PIM here and there, we stream 80 to 90 PIM mutations per second across various systems. You get a PIM frontend with appropriate access and that's it. Technically, the only real PIM work the teams do is corrections, there is practically no manual entry. Luckily for us, we p…

> Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. And you wouldn't need to, you would extract a much smaller subset to Excel and enjoy a superior user interface further analysing that

Our PIM team disagrees with that take. They enjoy the PIM interface and Excel doesn't come close to the data hierarchy and relationships our systems provide. And that includes reporting, vendor exchange and internal integrations.

But perhaps you're missing the point here (like plenty of others): it is not about handling a few offline rows, it's about re-inventing established systems that have proven their value and risk mitigations. We don't want someone to setup a collection files to build a homebrew PIM or ERP or CRM because they feel like it, disconnecting themselves from the organisation and teams they work with. In most cases, single player data silos are bad.

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

#340

Post by fuzzfactor »

oneplane wrote: post #273
Affric wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except without a way to get the computer to behave the way they want they have an arm strung behind their back in the modern economy. EDIT: I think my experience could likely be in a situation very different to yours. Thinking about it more deeply I am describing an org up to its neck in tech debt and in a changing market where regulation is tighter than ever. So, I think the pathologies are definitely more specific…

That's not what our users tell us, and we're beating the competition so I guess you're either wrong or not familiar with the market we're in.

>If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel.

So true, but not everybody runs a company like it was a business :\

You may have to turn over every rock, but you just might find some bureaucracy "occasionally".

If your job is to manage X cases which have traditionally been done without a computer, you have the greatest advantage if you can outperform your peers when they don't have a computer either.

If X case management software is then adopted, there will once again be a level playing field, the traditional leader maintains their traditional leadership as long as that is something that is effectively leveraged by the software.

Otherwise, less-naturally-outperforming leadership may prevail once software comes on the scene, and it could very well be impossible for the previously-leading professional to compare with a peer who is also capable of writing the software themselves. Especially when there is good commercial or open-source software already. That way the domain expert having the programming ability doesn't have to spend time programming, but the insight into procuring software and creating workflows can't be matched after a certain point. Just because they actually are capable of programming it themselves if they really had to.

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