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Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

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Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#91

Post by nommm-nommm »

eterm wrote: post #15
adrianN wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing complex modelling in Excel is not a good idea. There is no way to do proper software engineering, so bugs are common and hard to find. For examples, see http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm

Except "proper software engineering" would mean whatever is being built simply never gets built. In many cases it's better to get somewhere quickly with excel then work out if "proper software engineering" is required than never get off the ground because engineering something is too difficult. Think of excel like lego. Someone can quickly build something out of lego. Now if someone tried to build a cathedral from le…

In the past I've made a lot of money converting organization's mammoth mess of spreadsheets into a proper solution. I've done this for more than one organization.

The problem is Excel is easy to abuse, thats the way people know how to to solve problems so it doesn't occur to them they may need proper software to do what they need to do, not that they don't have the funds. All the companies I've worked for have had the funds.

Most organizations don't audit their spreadsheets nor keep backups or have a method of keeping track of them - the spreadsheet you get emailed may not be the current version. Its par for the course for spreadsheets to be done in a completely ad hoc manner with no controls whatsoever.

From my experience fixing spreadsheet messes, they usually waste person-hours like crazy and end up costing more than paying an engineer for custom software or getting an off the self solution. This has been my experience.

Spreadsheet abuse was a factor in JPMorgan losing 2 billion dollars in 2012, for example.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#94

Post by nommm-nommm »

collyw wrote: post #78
iofj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However the excel solution has a lot of things going for it : 1) applications/reports built by the people designing and understanding the underlying needs and inner workings of whatever they're offering. Whilst very good programmers can match this (given enough - that's a lot - time), average programmers won't even try. 2) excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into…

"excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real development." Not to build, but to maintain and constantly clean up the errors by using the wrong tool for the job. I know form experience having wasted countless hours because my organisation insisted on using it as a tool to upload data to our database, and using it as the…

The errors they invariably introduce are also very expensive. Not just fixing them, but actions on incorrect data can be very very expensive. I've seen it, and in my experience its almost universal.

I'm not saying Excel is always the wrong solution, I am saying Excel is not always the right solution but it can appear to be. That makes it very dangerous.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#95

Post by thedevil »

cm2187 wrote: post #83
thedevil wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that n…

Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UD…

I wouldn't recommend most of these ideas to Microsoft.

For example, I've done work where I've needed a recalc based on an updated csv so your suggestion would have broken Excel for some of my use cases. There's plenty of changes to recalc rules I would have liked, but I'm not sure any of them were unambiguously good ideas.

Also, scripting in spreadsheets is bad practice (besides maybe formatting or simple data fetching and even those are questionable). It's not what spreadsheets are for.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#96

Post by phonon »

nanny wrote: post #75
phonon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In addition, it is completely useless for handling any type of delimited file. By default it supports csv. If you want to view a pipe-delimited file, you have to dig into the language settings of Windows, change the default delimiter, and open the file. Then, you cannot edit comma-separated files without changing it back first. So, there's no way to convert one to the other. Same problem with tab delimiters. Totally…

That doesn't help you edit the file, though. It only helps you convert it to an Excel file. You still can't save as anything other than comma-separated without changing the language settings.

First, you're wrong again, you can also save as tab delimited text or just text. Also, Access has some more Excel export options. http://superuser.com/a/107124

Secondly, Excel is not designed for round trip editing in plain text formats. You shouldn't use Word as a text editor either :-)

There are specialized editors if you want to directly edit a csv file etc. I use them sometimes. That's not what Excel is for.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#97

Post by thrownear »

psykovsky wrote: post #39
jrcii wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is not perfect but it is best in class. I've built and maintained a time-series statistics research database for one of the largest trade associations in the world for over 10 years which heavily integrates with Excel. In so doing I've become intimately familiar with its quarks and shortcomings but ultimately it always provides a path to accomplish your goals, including high-performance automation https://msdn.…

you seem to be talking about php...

Php is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#99

Post by CompelTechnic »

jrcii wrote: post #11
geori wrote: post #2

MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

Excel is not perfect but it is best in class. I've built and maintained a time-series statistics research database for one of the largest trade associations in the world for over 10 years which heavily integrates with Excel. In so doing I've become intimately familiar with its quarks and shortcomings but ultimately it always provides a path to accomplish your goals, including high-performance automation https://msdn.…

As a mechanical engineer, excel has been a wonderful tool. Engineers in our department get to have a smooth transition into programming competency in VBA, which has found itself extremely useful in many mechanical engineering analyses.

My coworkers are given the ability to crawl (simple equations in spreadsheets) then walk (user-defined functions) then run (automatic iterative solutions in UDF's, applying test data to create UDF models of machine performance). Not something a lot of mechanical folks would ever find themselves doing unless an already well-used tool has a good progression toward more complex and demanding use cases.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#100

Post by 6stringmerc »

_pmf_ wrote: post #46
FussyZeus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of Word: The vast majority of people don't realize just how massive Word is in terms of it's feature set and it's complexity, Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor. I still have and use it irregularly for a few things, but if you just need to edit text with formatting, use TextEdit. Using Word to type up a memo is like using a jet engine to cook a TV…

> Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor. "Oh, I need to change the format of headings? Well, I guess I'll have to go through all 1536 instances!" -- someone with very good Office skills

Very good? Hm. That doesn't sound anything like the very good answer of "Styles & Formatting > Heading 2 > Modify > Update All.
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