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Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel. Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is

by deong 9y ago

Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel. Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.

debaserab2 9y ago
I hear this argument a lot and I still don't buy it. I use more advanced functionality than 90% of my coleagues and I don't find google spreadsheet stops me in any way. Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.
- dbattaglia 9y ago
  My guess is mainly legacy stuff (VBA macros) and .Net/COM based plugins that may be purchased or developed in-house at some businesses. For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    Those companies need to hire programmers and use a programming language like R.
  - debaserab2 9y ago
    If you're using excel as a programming interface it's going to be hard to dig out of that. Of course, one could argue that excel was never a good place for that sort of thing in the first place.
baldfat 9y ago
> I don't think there's any replacement for Excel That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spreadsheet-errors/#69c7221b56ab https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr... One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"
- Closey 9y ago
  Although it's a nice thought, the benefit of excel is it's comparatively low barrier-to-entry, ubiquity and transparency (in terms of other people being able to understand how a calculation was derived). It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors. Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
- stefco_ 9y ago
  I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would lead to saner results or fewer errors. I would certainly prefer python and org mode to excel and word, thought.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  I would be astonished if switching from Excel to Python or R or something else yielded even a 12% (much less greater than that) error free rate.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Excel is programming. It's just not the kind you do or like. The number of programming things people have done in Excel and Access is astounding, as is the number of people who've learned to program without realizing it as a result of using those tools. Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
  - rrix2 9y ago
    Even more: Excel is purely functional programming for the vast majority of functions that people use in Excel.
- eropple 9y ago
  > People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.
debaserab2 9y ago
Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer? COM and VBA scripting? Access database sourcing? Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors). It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer? PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)
  - debaserab2 9y ago
    All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)" I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features. > As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent. > You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech. You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

by deong 9y ago

debaserab2 9y ago

I hear this argument a lot and I still don't buy it. I use more advanced functionality than 90% of my coleagues and I don't find google spreadsheet stops me in any way. Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.

dbattaglia 9y ago
My guess is mainly legacy stuff (VBA macros) and .Net/COM based plugins that may be purchased or developed in-house at some businesses. For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Those companies need to hire programmers and use a programming language like R.
- debaserab2 9y ago
  If you're using excel as a programming interface it's going to be hard to dig out of that. Of course, one could argue that excel was never a good place for that sort of thing in the first place.

baldfat 9y ago

> I don't think there's any replacement for Excel That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spreadsheet-errors/#69c7221b56ab https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr... One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"

Closey 9y ago
Although it's a nice thought, the benefit of excel is it's comparatively low barrier-to-entry, ubiquity and transparency (in terms of other people being able to understand how a calculation was derived). It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors. Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
stefco_ 9y ago
I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would lead to saner results or fewer errors. I would certainly prefer python and org mode to excel and word, thought.
dwighttk 9y ago
I would be astonished if switching from Excel to Python or R or something else yielded even a 12% (much less greater than that) error free rate.
ubernostrum 9y ago
Excel is programming. It's just not the kind you do or like. The number of programming things people have done in Excel and Access is astounding, as is the number of people who've learned to program without realizing it as a result of using those tools. Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
- rrix2 9y ago
  Even more: Excel is purely functional programming for the vast majority of functions that people use in Excel.
eropple 9y ago
> People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.

debaserab2 9y ago

Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer? COM and VBA scripting? Access database sourcing? Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors). It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer? PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)
- debaserab2 9y ago
  All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)" I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features. > As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent. > You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech. You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.