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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

#351

Post by wjnc »

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 hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.

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

#352

Post by Eggpants »

My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators.

I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat/lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set.

I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations.

A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing.

Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on/off with color.

Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone.

I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.

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

#353

Post by keithalewis »

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…

Control-backtick toggles formulas. No need for VB(A).

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

#354

Post by fakedang »

deepspace wrote: post #285
whall6 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 60 year old CFO As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.

As other commenters explained, Excel is universal. Excel is the global manifestation of God on Earth. Excel is the final avatar. If Pythagoras were alive now, he would get Excel in an instant.

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

#355

Post by freeAgent »

wkat4242 wrote: post #323
ekianjo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’ve removed that limitation now, I think. That said, I still haven’t found any use-case for Copilot within an Excel workbook that works (probably because I’ve only ever asked it to do very difficult things since I don’t need it for easy stuff). So there’s that.

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

#356

Post by keithalewis »

I wrote something to make it simple to embed C++ in Excel. It is useful for pushing business logic into platform independent code that can be integrated into back end production systems. One bonus is the original spreadsheet has unit tests vetted by the business users. https://github.com/xlladdins/xll

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

#357

Post by listenallyall »

wruza wrote: post #334
listenallyall wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and

b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal.

It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.

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

#358

Post by sam29681749 »

zo1 wrote: post #132
financetechbro wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had the pleasure of investing many hours across excel and gsheets. I’m currently at an org that uses MS suite and excel collaboration across OneDrive & Sharepoint is almost seamless now as long as long as you’re on the cloud

I don't think people are remotely aware how Good MS tools are atm when it comes to collaboration and integration with their "other" suit of tools. Yes, it's ugly sharepoint under the hood somewhere, but for all intents and purposes it looks and works like magic when I'm collaborating in real-time with my coworkers over any sort of MS document. This whole "real time collaboration" comment as a reason to prefer some ha…

Our team runs into errors (changes not syncing, etc.) on a regular basis 'collaborating' with Excel. definately doesn't work like magic in my experience.

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

#359

Post by ChicagoDave »

abenga wrote: post #332
ChicagoDave wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spreadsh…

There are definitely levels of sophistication in managing interest liabilities. If you have a mortgage at 3%, paying the principal early is wasting your extra monty. As you said, you can invest the extra and make 7% (hypothetical) and clearly that’s advantageous.

My example is for people struggling with credit cards and high interest loans that don’t have investment properties.

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

#360

Post by wruza »

listenallyall wrote: post #357
wruza wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal. It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start wi…

I am not respectful of excel at all, true. I could see your perspective, if it wasn’t a client who comes by itself(!) begging to do something with their spreadsheets cause key roles spend all day maintaining these, blocking further growth or mergers. Maybe I should not have called it crap out if respect to a client, but that’s what it was from the design pov, no reason to spare a word. I didn’t like it cause no one likes to dig in such sort of legacy. You treat the failure rate as an excel good indicator, well that may seem true until you get yet another call for help. It’s a failure rate of excel. I agree that we should have just bailed out by default and left them to sales sharks. At some point that’s what I did basically, said no to yet another “project”, cause these were crappy low hanging fruits that no one else wanted to deal with, not interesting jobs. Idk how it all assembles into “excel good” in some minds. As if companies just called integrators out of boredom because everything they’ve built in excel works.
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