Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 377 posts

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

#341

Post by eviks »

oneplane wrote: post #339
eviks wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

Sure, agreeing would be a fireable offence "And anyone who wants to build a system where it is, is not working for us."

But the non-PIM teams agree, and they are a few orders of magnitude bigger and more important.

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

#342

Post by MegaDeKay »

wwweston wrote: post #227
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.

> 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…

You are nitpicking. I was referring to "code" in the traditional sense of C, C++, Javascript, etc contained in what are otherwise plain text files. I thought that my reference was ok given the HN audience but apparently not.

Excel supporting VBA macros blurs the lines but given that auditors spend so much time in Excel, they get to know that too. Now that Excel, has official support for Python, I suppose they'll need to have to come up to speed on that as well.

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

#343

Post by throw10920 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#344

Post by MegaDeKay »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #293
dilippkumar wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right. It is more like a comprehensive series of spot checks. And like a security auditor, they have free rein to dig in to a particular area if they find something that doesn't smell right. I was on the Engineering side in my old job so I didn't interact with them too much, but here is one example: our company would claim depreciation on some test equipment and once I had to track down one of those pieces of test equipment and show that we indeed had the unit we claimed to have, down to the serial number. They didn't check for every piece of equipment, just the one.

Auditability is being able to back up what you claim with a record of some kind (receipt, purchase order, etc). Our QA group referred to this type of thing as "objective evidence". If your QA process says that you "shall have a design review", you need to prove that that review was held. In our case, our process said that minutes for that review had to be recorded. Our QA auditors would ask to see those minutes. Thank you ISO9001.

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

#345

Post by PopAlongKid »

pdm55 wrote: post #174

Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story. The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan. In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My Ph…

>The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets.

There were millions of spreadsheet users by 1986, as VisiCalc was released in 1979[0] and similar programs like SuperCalc[1] were also in use. They were both ported to IBM PC and saw significant use in the corporate world prior to and including 1986.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc

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

#346

Post by PopAlongKid »

ddingus wrote: post #163
heraldgeezer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly for office just massgrave it The rest, yes I love OSS tools on Windows. But have fun when their important word docs get garbled (it's an example, do not come after me with some "uuuh acually word docs open fine now")

Yeah, it is not perfect. Nothing is. I find explaining a few good computing practices coupled with a tour of the many fine OSS tools available literally for the asking, does real good for anyone willing to invest a bit of their time. MS Office itself can corrupt its own documents. Ask many of us how we know, right? Now that is more rare than it is for the OSS tools, but it does happen. You are not wrong. I am not sur…

>The most important aspects of all this boil down to people being able to do stuff other people would prefer they not do.

Can you elaborate please? I don't get your point.

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

#347

Post by iwontberude »

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…

So by your logic, if the entire audit world used Numbers, you would be using Numbers. That isn’t remotely close to the rationale for why we don’t code BASIC in Notepad and is probably the reason why people here find Excel to be a less than ideal choice. We use the right tool for the job, not the tool that all of the industry uses because we would be screwed otherwise.

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

#348

Post by wizzwizz4 »

DrBazza wrote: post #20
standardUser wrote: post #6

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known prob…

And there I was getting bothered about the limits of the xlcall c api.

Running 32-bit Excel mitigates quite a few of the limits. Sadly, I haven't managed to get WoW64 DLLs to load in 64-bit Excel: that would eliminate the majority of the issues, but it's tricky to set that up in the first place without the ability to store 64-bit return values (e.g. handles).

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

#349

Post by fuzzfactor »

jimnotgym wrote: post #224
elmerfud wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take your Hammer example it really depends on what you're doing. If the only thing you're doing is pounding framing nails then one framing hammer is generally suitable. If you need to pound framing nails and you need to do metal work and you need to do fine finish work you will need a number of different hammers to accomplish those jobs and have a good outcome in each task. Your argument is that Excel is fine at b…

Counterpoint. Before I retrained in finance I was a carpenter & joiner, and a good one too. People would wait for months for my gang to be free. Nail guns were rare in my country back then. There are only so many tools you could carry to site so you had to compromise. I had to hammer in 4" nails, so carried a 20oz Stanley claw hammer. Then it would rain so we would move to finish work...all with the same hammer. It w…

That's no fair, you're using your tool as an instrument ;)

As I would say in instrument theory.

This can be tough for some logicians to handle when they say "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" when it's literally true on the surface.

It's just that most people don't even get basic tool use, much less move beyond, and it's quite understandable why.

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

#350

Post by fuzzfactor »

standardUser wrote: post #6

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known prob…

Try it with more memory and/or larger swapfile space on your drive.

It might be OK until 8 specialty fonts need to be reproduced beyond a certain number of cells. If more memory was all it takes to fix, that would be good to know.

Post reply on HN