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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

wsj.com

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#51

Post by sailfast »

This article appears to be about how senior leadership wants to pay people that are not financial analysts to create reports that can then somehow be used by financial analysts (probably after exporting to CSV so they can work in Excel?)

This sounds great if you know exactly what reports you need and have the resources to build them, but I'm not really sure how this kind of initiative means "stop using excel". This article is advocating for a solid API / data management / data catalog program from what I'm reading.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#52

Post by avar »

mabbo wrote: post #18

I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…

Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#53

Post by anakic »

microcolonel wrote: post #35
mabbo wrote: post #18

I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…

I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…

I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may.

I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation.

The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are:

- process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq

- move data between Excel and databases

- fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code)

- replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation

It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage.

It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com.

I posted about it a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488

Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#54

Post by sailfast »

lvoudour wrote: post #44
nindalf wrote: post #2

This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine article [1]. [1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It sure does smell like a PR assisted attack on excel in favor of enterprise solutions

This is true, but, I also clicked because of the title. Well baited trap.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#55

Post by microcolonel »

walterbell wrote: post #48
microcolonel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.

Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ ?

That's quite cool, thanks for the link. Tables seem to be a more popular model for finance and similar, but it's always interesting to see new data models like this.

This could allow for more interesting things like gathering fields from records into a meta-table from a relational DB, that would definitely be a valuable next step.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#56

Post by whyenot »

adekok wrote: post #19

Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pap... https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-... he authors found that Microsoft Excel would often interpret “SEPT2”, which corresponds to the gene Septin 2, as “September 2nd”. The programme also tended to mistake identification codes like “2310009E13” for numbers in scientific n…

This is what screwed me over as a herbarium curator (a herbarium is a type of natural history museum for plants):

Excel completely corrupts dates before the year 1900. It just boggles the mind -- if your spreadsheet has dates for 10,000 years from now that works fine, but if there are any dates from the 19th century or earlier, it can cause big problems.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#58

Post by yorwba »

fiatjaf wrote: post #6

What should we use, then? I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data. After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on tha…

> It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on that schema and then give it to the non-tech people.

Would it be feasible if you only had to write the schema and the software were generated based on the schema?

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#59

Post by flarg »

walterbell wrote: post #48
microcolonel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.

Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ ?

Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#60

Post by ransom1538 »

mabbo wrote: post #18

I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel…

You can do crazy shit in excel. After someone opens an excel sheet - download a webpage and save it to disk? no problem. Lets load other excel files in memory and run their scripts too! Don't worry about your computer fan - while we scan your disk for stuff. Just state "On Error Resume Next" and start scanning hardware. Company email accounts are stuffed with one off sketchy excel attachments.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-downl...

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