How Many Spreadsheets Does It Take to Run a Fortune 500 Company?

I now develop excel add in for a customer.the reason they used to it and hard to changed their mindset.what they thinking is cheaper and fast decision making with excel rather then erp itself.

This read like a straight advertisement, yet I didn't hear any real solution other than some sort of "fantastic fix". Frankly, a bit disappointing from Wired. My car seems to come out fine, regardless of the number of spreadsheets involved, thanks.

Imo, this is not a quality article worthy of submission to HN.

> Instead of a static data model, we build services around a Modeling Engine that is purpose built to change dynamically.

This is one of those abstract sentences that's typical of marketing hype. If you go to their website to try and research the actual concrete details, you get another high-level overview[1] and clicking on a potential whitepaper is walled off by data-entry screen for contact info (email, phone#, etc.)[2].

[1]http://www.aras.com/technology/model-based-soa.aspx [2]http://www.aras.com/plm-software/100063.aspx

Googling around for actual screen shots of their product, I see the typical GUI type of tools for drag&drop flowcharts and process workflow:

http://plmalpha.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/bpm-workflow-serial...

If those shots are representative of their "dynamic model-based" product, then no, it will not eliminate "spreadsheet hell".

The article is naive about how and why spreadsheets are pervasive and why they will always outpace the speed of IT departments. Ideas such as 4GL, or DSL, or GUI workflow visualizers, or cloud-based tools, etc, etc will not eliminate spreadsheets.

Excel is actually a pretty sophisticated tool for end-users. It has a scripting language (VBA), it can pull data straight out of databases via ODBC and it can do sophisticated data visualizations (pivot tables and pivot charts). Its weakest point seems to be the inability to trace and document the complex web of formulas in a spreadsheet - you can't diff the old version of a spreadsheet against a new one and see what changes you made in the formulas. If someone could build a tool that could do that, it might make spreadsheets less opaque and more reliable.

What a weird idea, I wonder why Wired would want to allow anyone to post content under their site. I know it's not the 'real' Wired site, but still seems odd. What's to stop some crazy person like timecube guy from making their home on Wired and harming the 'brand'?