41–50 of 282 posts
Even now the limit is ~1million rows, meaning that if you have even a very simple table but lots of rows then you have to pay more for Access.
smallpox had no animal reservoirs
Most viruses (and other diseases) have animal reservoirs, and that's why few diseases which ever get widespread, are ever eradicated, and it's nothing to do with spreadsheets.
Now if he wanted to make a point about data, it would be good to mention that we have very little data on, say, how many species have which of these diseases, and how that's changing over time. But that wouldn't have much to do with spreadsheets either.
Spreadsheets are a hammer so if that's all you know then all problems look like the nail. Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start, but there are many options better than Excel for critical systems.
Excel is more than just a hammer it’s the fork that is in every single drawer of every single company/org in the world. It’s not about every problem looking like a nail, it’s that, nobody had to pay for this fork, somehow everyone has it and it’s such a great fork that it can do 90% of the problems you throw at it. Yea sure some problems would be better solved with specialized tools, (eg knife, spoon, etc) but those…
Spreadsheets are a hammer so if that's all you know then all problems look like the nail. Really, many power users of Excel ought to be looking at more capable, testable and readable solutions from professional data analysts and scientists. Python would be a good start, but there are many options better than Excel for critical systems.
what would python be working on then? a .csv, textfile, database, something else? Or would the data be stored as part of the script itself?
* The Utility of Spreadsheets No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value. The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to E…
Spreadsheets aren't 100% reliable for use cases where you need to collaborate and share immutable health records. Especially during a time of global emergency when tensions are heightened.
Spreadsheets don't impose validation, schema correctness, constraints, etc. and can amplify human errors. They can also inject errors of their own (eg. turning March1 the gene [1] into a date) when they're simply trying to be helpful.
How do multiple people manage a spreadsheet? How do you safely merge spreadsheets? How do you keep records from being duplicated or replaced? How do you do double bookkeeping? Can you atomically identify individual records?
This article is saying that we have to realize spreadsheets can be a source of scientific error simply because of their design intentions and ergonomics.
The closing remarks estimate that 1,500 people died as a result of spreadsheet error. That's remarkable.
Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…
I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code. Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption t…
My mother self-learnt excel, first as a to-do list, then a money tracker, then she learned some simple equations to keep track of weekly spending.
How in R would someone do that? With a nice graphical view? I agree Excel has many many issues, but people use it because, in my experience, it super easy to use and in particular let's you easily mix data and code.
Yes, hijack my scrolling. I really don't like have a consistent feedback when I am scrolling pages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what would python be working on then? a .csv, textfile, database, something else? Or would the data be stored as part of the script itself?
You would have the script take in the data as input from somewhere else, maybe your organizations shared drive. could be a .csv or whatever format. could be a database like sqlite. Much better than some big hulking macro heavy excel workbook.
Lots of data in business isn't generated by another program, it's built and maintained by users.
Many businesses risk it all by building actual applications with Excel. Security, version control, automated testing are pretty much set aside. Case in point: https://insideparadeplatz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ubs-...
It's a two-pronged attack of using tools that you have figured out as you go (not everyone is an educated, practiced, professional programmer, or even good at Excel) and a sunk cost fallacy/resistance to changing what "works".
Excel has its flaws, as do spreadsheets in general, but the upside is that spreadsheets allow people to become programmers who never would grok programming in purely abstract terms. Spreadsheets allow the user to see each intermediate state in their application, as well as each iteration over the input data set, laid out in a 2-dimensional grid. There just isn't any substitute I've seen that is as accessible to the c…
It allows people to become programmers by making them learn this clumsy tough gui that isn't readily apparent how anything works, and changes between versions. I don't think the learning curve is any easier than what it would take to make a person actually into a programmer with a language like python or R. A two hour tutorial in either language is probably all you need to do 90% of what people use excel for. Why not just skip the abstraction and learn how to actually program if you have to spend time learning how to faux program in excel anyway?