82 ms·

Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

• nindalf 9y ago
  This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine article [1]. [1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  • lvoudour 9y ago
    It sure does smell like a PR assisted attack on excel in favor of enterprise solutions
    • sailfast 9y ago
      This is true, but, I also clicked because of the title. Well baited trap.
  • blihp 9y ago
    Absolutely right. Excel (and spreadsheets in general) are bad social media/groupware/workflow tools... who knew? This just in: word processors make for a lousy DBMS... film at 11! Points for their SEO/clickbait headline: it hooked me... this time (-1 one added to my personal WSJ lifetime value calculation)
• ckastner 9y ago
  > A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes. Then I believe it should say stop abusing Excel. Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate data from 400+ sources, you're doing it wrong.
  • quirkot 9y ago
    Agree. > A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes. Reads to me like, "last year Mr. Bell's team spent hours hammering in nails by smacking them with the wooden part of the hammer's handle"
  • backtoyoujim 9y ago
    I agree. Excel files prolly should not be distributed using the same method as a freshly-out-of-the-ditto-machine dictaphone memo from 1967. And the premise that things have changed enough to warrant reevaluating worn out business processes like Mr. Bell's here is true enough. But dumping a tool because some out of touch C-level tool says so is a recipe for huge traction loss. I mean ... people that use nail-guns for a living still have to use hammers.
  • jonnypickel 9y ago
    This is the point that's going to get missed a lot. In the corporate world Excel is the proverbial hammer to nearly every use case involving data manipulation, regardless of how well suited it is for the task. Edit: I just noticed that I'm the third person to reply to you and we all referenced hammers.
    • pessimizer 9y ago
      I don't know that Excel was the wrong tool for this task. I'm not sure why the spreadsheets couldn't have been distributed and consumed automatically by an Excel application, or at least by helper applications that were fed by and/or into Excel sheets. An Excel spreadsheet is a good enough form; and I don't think replacing one with a webform or pdf form would be any better. edit: my favorite thing about using excel is that instead of spitting out an answer, you can spit out an Excel sheet that shows a lot of the work itself, therefore partially explaining the answer to the people that have to consume it. The product of your program can often be another program, giving the person receiving the report the opportunity to tweak or add new parameters to your output. Basically currying accounting calculations.
• abricot 9y ago
  Sounds more like they should get a proper ERP and/or HR system to solve this.
• Gustomaximus 9y ago
  The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself. Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.
  • kemiller2002 9y ago
    I agree. Those are great products, if you have the staff to support and use them, but this is rarely the case. Every time I see a company implement them, they think it's going to be a silver bullet to reporting and analytics, and most of the time it just causes a mess, because no one really knows how to properly use them, or if someone does, that person doesn't have the bandwidth to keep up with the entire organization's needs. Excel is amazing, it's relatively easy to use, has immense power for dealing with calculations and graphs, and it is cheap. An organization's problem isn't excel, its the fact that they keep 20 copies of the same data and no one is keeping track of which is the source of truth.
    • stephengillie 9y ago
      Every email reply becomes an independent fork of the data inside the spreadsheet. The issue is storing and sending the file locally, and the solution is storing it in a centralized location. Cloud storage is often used towards this end, but on-premises file shares work very well too. This is one of those solved problems that companies inexplicably keep working to solve again.
      • megaman22 9y ago
        It's such a bizarrely difficult uphill battle. We have Office 365, with a damned good web editor, and the ability to save directly to OneDrive/Sharepoint from the desktop client, with the versioning that that supports, and we still end up with shit emailed all over and files with version-12.xlsx and -$DATE.xlsx saved here, there, and everywhere.
• fiatjaf 9y ago
  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 that schema and then give it to the non-tech people.
  • tallanvor 9y ago
    That's a hard question to answer and depends on your size and what you really need. For small companies, Excel may really be all that you need. But at a certain size, you might want to use something like PowerBI instead since it will also pull directly from the database and you can share the dashboards you create very easily. Large companies like the article are referring to might be able to get by with PowerBI (Microsoft would certainly argue there are still plenty of places where it works) or ERP/HR tools more specifically designed for certain uses.
    • CurtHagenlocher 9y ago
      The same ETL functionality that's in Power BI is also available in Excel 2010+ as "Power Query".
      • fiatjaf 9y ago
        See also https://www.querystorm.com/ https://www.querystorm.com/
  • rjtavares 9y ago
    Teach people how to use excel properly: - treat inputs and outputs separately - always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles, basic vlookups for relationships, etc.) - use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the pivot tables. EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the same...
• jwdunne 9y ago
  I think the problem is they're using Excel as a database as opposed to a spreadsheet. That's fine at small scale, it's easier to manage and even easier to get going, but Adobe scale? They should advise "Stop using Excel for what it's not".
• chatmasta 9y ago
  How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
  • bob_theslob646 9y ago
    Exactly! I read it as such as well. Advertising usually costs 80k.
  • SnowingXIV 9y ago
    Likely not that much. HuffPost, Business Insider, and others articles can be bought for a few hundred bucks.
  • fiatjaf 9y ago
    what are they advertising?
    • Bishonen88 9y ago
      "Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors. The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE. This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training. Adobe switched to Anaplan early last year and many of the tasks previously performed in spreadsheets are now done in the system, maintaining “one source of truth,” Mr. Garrett said."
    • rdslw 9y ago
      Easy: > Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors. Indeed Very fast into the article I classified it as advertisment.
    • mikehotel 9y ago
      Probably referring to the alternatives mentioned Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors. Could also be the updates in Excel.
• baxtr 9y ago
  I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons - excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want etc - speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying - analysis: It's easy to do some basic analysis without studying CS
  • rjtavares 9y ago
    I agree with those 3 reasons, but I wouldd add a fourth: easy to create your own version of the truth. I'm not implying this is due to nefarious reasons (though sometimes it is): sometimes the official version of the truth is just not adequate.
    • tcarn 9y ago
      Definitely, great point. Tools like Tableau/Power BI make it very easy to get a misleading version of the truth, since it can very easily include misleading data points and/or make calculations in a fashion that leads the user to misinterpret KPIs.
  • arethuza 9y ago
    I have - worked on getting Hyperion FM implemented across ~30 countries fed by about 40 ERP systems. All outputs were generated by a .Net application generating read-only Excel spreadsheets (which might have 30 tabs and up to 15,000 values on a tab) - was done this way to meet the very complex reporting requirements. All the ~20 report packs in the company were produced with one click in a simple web app. Ah-hoc querying of Hyperion was done from Excel using the SmartView plugin.
  • enraged_camel 9y ago
    Actually, the main reason is that SAP is expensive as hell. The starter package is $1400 per user (one time) or $410 per user per year. And that's just the software. Add consulting services that are always necessary to actually make it fit your organization and you're easily looking at millions of dollars in capital spend.
• blunte 9y ago
  The issues raised in this article are far less about failings of Excel but rather typical failures of business to plan long term and put effort/resources into comprehensive solutions.
• mabbo 9y ago
  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 capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming. Within the Amazon warehouse world, I have seen incredible innovation using it. An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers lives while serving in Afghanistan[0]. I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190
  • microcolonel 9y ago
    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 processes would probably create more than a billion dollars of real value every year with even limited adoption. While it may be true that Excel is overused, I believe that the spreadsheet is chronically underused as a model for software development.
    • piaste 9y ago
      This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?
      • microcolonel 9y ago
        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.
• adekok 9y ago
  Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-pap... https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-chart-3 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 notation—in this particular instance, the code would be read as 2.310009 times 101 Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis. Plus, it's limited precision can cause errors such as subtractive cancellation, etc. In order to correctly calculate complex formulae, the calculations must be done with an understanding of the limitations of the computers. e.g. you don't calculate (a^2-b^2) for large 'a' and 'b'. Instead, you calculate (a+b)*(a-b). That has the same mathematical result, but is not affected by subtractive cancellation.
  • FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis. Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?
    • adekok 9y ago
      Tell that to tens of thousands of researchers. Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research... If the tool doesn't work correctly by default. Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job. The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.
      • FLUX-YOU 9y ago
        Preferences have become a pretty natural part of using a computer, I'm not sure why we can't rely on users trying that when they run into problems. I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain. If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something more complicated like R, MATLAB, or SQL is even worse.
• jasode 9y ago
  The phrases "avoid data silos" and "we want single source of truth" have been used repeatedly about Excel misuse/abuse/overuse for 20+ years. The WSJ story talks about the complaint but not about the underlying tension between data redundancy vs data manipulation. Excel endures because it's the non-programmer's REPL for data. Like a Lisp REPL, using Excel is nimble and has an instant feedback loop. Click "A-Z" to sort ascending, click "Z-A" to sort descending. Move/hide/freeze columns. If one has intermediate-to-advanced skills, one can pivot the data on multiple axis. None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities. That's why the centralized systems like SAP ERP, Microsoft Team Foundation, mainframe sytems, etc offer functionality to export to Excel spreadsheets. (Or they offer export to csv files -- which is 1 step removed from Excel.) With MS TFS, you can even re-import from Excel so in that case, Excel acts as a sort of offline data-entry client for the project management tool. One middle ground between Excel data silos and the utopia of a centralized system is a shared document store like Sharepoint or Dropbox. The hierarchy would be something like: 1) Excel spreadsheets emailed around. Lots of redundancy; uncertainty of which version is canonical. 2) Excel xls file stored on Sharepoint with automatic version control. Employees must have discipline to only email links to the "one true" spreadsheet and never attach the actual xls file in the emails. 3) The data that was in Excel is migrated to centralized system and all data entry and reporting is done there. However, because the central systems are so cumbersome, this abstraction "leaks" back out to Excel because of the highly desired "export to Excel" functions! (This restarts the dreaded Excel "data silos" complaint cycle all over again.) There isn't an IT department in the world that can develop centralized IT solutions fast enough to keep up with the ways employees slice & dice data. That's why Excel is "overused".
  • gaius 9y ago
    None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities. You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.
    • 0x445442 9y ago
      Can you easily integrate with externals systems via REST & SOAP? I've done some quick web searches on this topic and have never seen anything that jumped out at me. I know Google Sheets gives you a little bit of this with Javascript embedding but I was searching for something more tightly integrated with Excel or LibreOffice.
• jimworm 9y ago
  "Stop using paper", says chief of a company that treats modified copies as if they were originals, "if we all carved our work on to this big stone in the middle of the courtyard then we'd be rid of our paper problems".
  • tpeo 9y ago
    "Wall Street is investing into the new pyramids. Here is why."
• walshemj 9y ago
  "Tell Staffs" really I am a dyslexic and even I wouldn't make such a trivial mistake with plural /singular.
  • kgwgk 9y ago
    The CFO of a company tells the staff of the company to stop using Excel; the CFOs of several companies tell the staffs of those companies to stop using Excel.
    • walshemj 9y ago
      no its not Several CEO's (plural) tell their Staff (singular ) a CEO only has one set of employees. The headline implies that all the CEO's have multiple sets of staff
      • kgwgk 9y ago
        If the headline said that CFOs love their wifes, would that imply polygamy?
• madengr 9y ago
  I thought the spreadsheet revolutionized accounting in the 80’s, not specifically Excel. My dad brought home an IBM PC in 82, using Multiplan for chemical mixing calculations. He thought it was the cat’s meow. Though Multiplan was the predecessor to Excel, the spreadsheet had been out since late 70’s.
• wimagguc 9y ago
  I'm on the market for another startup idea and one of the most ubiquitous advice I'm hearing nowadays is that "there's a startup in every Excel sheet". From that perspective WSJ is doing a great job in making the bed for these ideas: startups will eventually want to sell to those "Finance Chiefs" which is never an easy job.
  • osullivj 9y ago
    I'm in London too, doing a bootstrapped Excel startup. See my profile for contact details.
• dogruck 9y ago
  Can anybody think of other examples of products or tools that fall into the category of: “many people use them, even though management tells them not to, because it helps them get stuff done.” I’m not a mechanic, but is WD40 an example? Or maybe some tool like a hand held circular saw, in home construction? And, other examples from the tech world?
  • bbarn 9y ago
    Trello. In the last few jobs I've had there's almost always been a developer who has their own personal to do list on a trello board, even if we had robust tracking systems like jira and rally.
    • djhworld 9y ago
      Is that such a bad thing though? Having tickets in JIRA is for the team to track and plan work that needs to be done, not for storing personal garbage.
      • bbarn 9y ago
        No, but in smaller groups, it's been a tool to get things organized for teams, then big ERP rollouts happen and managers start saying "stop using trello, use this instead".
• fiatjaf 9y ago
  Why does a powerful Excel alternative like https://calculist.io/ https://calculist.io/ (that is not a spreadsheet) and others don't get much attention?
• gumballhead 9y ago
  “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data.“ That is literally all I did when I was a financial analyst and is how I became a programmer. This should be automatic, I thought.
• snksnk 9y ago
  Don't blame Excel if your processes suck. Excel is a tool, namely a Swiss army knife to edit and present data that is commonly used in business. It can be very powerful if you know what you are doing.
  • bbarn 9y ago
    Swiss army knife is a good analogy. Sure, it does lots of things, but if you want to do really big work, you'll probably want a chef's knife, or a saw, or a pair of scissors, not miniature versions of each designed to fit in a small package. That said, it's a great tool to survive in the woods :)
• sailfast 9y ago
  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.
• sbr464 9y ago
  Feels like an ad
  • sus_007 9y ago
    it's an add in deed.
• justthisguy 9y ago
  I think all the features he listed as reasons to switch away from excel are in excel. IMHO the issue there may be more training, process and good data management.
• flarg 9y ago
  I've worked with customers to setup support units specifically for Excel, helping their organisations develop and validate Excel spreadsheets and consider migration to more robust solutions when the time is right. As much as I dislike the general use of Excel there is an inescapable fact, Excel is a great source of bottom up innovation and ideas from non programmers which we should endeavour to capture and not just forbid.
• submeta 9y ago
  > “I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said This! I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor via search/replace), and if they are "very sophisticated" they save it in MS Access, join tables, connect the dots, export back to Excel, analyse the data via Pivot Tables etc. And they do these steps repeatedly, every week. Without stopping and asking if there might be better solutions out there. (In German IT curriculums they call this "Medienbruch" = "media discontinuity"?) I have seen this in so many companies and thought to myself: This is an excellent case for a consulting pitch. And I could literally transform their work. And I am not talking about selling data warehouse solutions with ETL processes and the like. Twenty years ago I realized I could do all these preprocessing and transformations with Perl. Now I do these kind of things with Python and Pandas etc. So there are so many solutions that are a huge improvement. Still these departments do it with Excel/VBA/Access.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    Don't forget the all-to-common scenario: "Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint." So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same story. Welcome to life as an office drone!
    • Nicholas_C 9y ago
      I used to work as a corporate financial planning analyst and this hit way too close to home. Then one executive who didn’t like the story would have one of his analysts pull the same data in a slightly different way and adjust it. The executive would then show it to the CFO and tell him that’s the real story. The CFO would turn to you and ask why his number is different than yours. Then you would spend hours with the analyst reconciling the data and building a waterfall chart to send to the CFO to explain the difference. Then if you’re really unlucky the CFO says he wants to see the data both ways with a waterfall reconciliation every month.
• dizzy3gg 9y ago
  I worked at nPower, in MIS, they used to link about 16 spreadsheets together because they "didn't like" SQL. These are one of the UKs big six energy companies.
• throwaway2016a 9y ago
  It is amazing how many simple tasks at a company can be done with Excel that as programmers we often write custom code for. When all you have is a hammer... At the same time. I have seen banks transfer money between branches by literally FTP transferring an Excel file. At some point there has got to be a better way. At least use SFTP :)
  • pythonaut_16 9y ago
    I've thought about this before. Does it mean that our libraries aren't good enough? Do we just not know how to use them? I often wish there was an intermediate between writing a fully custom piece of software for something and using excel. This about how many times you've worked on a web service (or other technology) and how much of the code is basically identical to every other webservice in that technology minus some unique data models and a few functions of custom logic.
• api 9y ago
  This feels a lot like a submarine ad. Also if this guy thinks he's going to escape silos by putting everything in the cloud, he's quite mistaken. The cloud is just code running somewhere else. It does not change fundamental computing paradigms.
• justthisguy 9y ago
  Sounds like misuse of excel rather than don't use it.. no mention of powerpivot , query tool or connections. also there is much more to consider when switching to a cloud solution.
• scraft 9y ago
  All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel, far from it. I tend to see small, well suited, sheets being created in Excel, and then iteratively new features get added "Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month" "Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency values" "As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both places" "When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically update" "We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have an automated job for that" Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs, etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all works. But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over, and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system. They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain about instead!
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    To be fair, this kind of unobstructed scope creep is how all software gets "out of control," not just Excel sheets.
• ninjamayo 9y ago
  Like others said in here people like and use Excel because it is a flexible, visual, programming language. We haven't got alternative solutions for all the people who want to program like that. Instead more and more companies come up with very rigid, workflow based systems who actually haven't got the freedom Excel has. The only proper attempt in solving this problem has been made by people like Bret Victor but nothing commercialized at least as I am aware of. Accounting, finance and even data processing / analytics software companies still live in the Middle Ages in terms of user interactivity and flexibility which is why a lot of us resort to programming languages.
• b1daly 9y ago
  I'm only use spreadsheets here and there., bit this article has the kind of grating stupidity that adds to the conceptual noise we are surrounded with. To replace Excel with software X, you would have to deliver software that would provide the Same kind of flexibilty. That is a very difficult kind of software to develop! One very basic and powerful aspect of excel is simply the fluidity of the display. You can cram a lot of information onto a single screen, resize and move rows/columns, use colors. As apposed to a clunky web app interface that has low information density, inflexible data scheme,and the crippled UX of a typical web app. That's not to say that the example given in the article doesn't point out a real problem. But I wonder if doing some custom UI and re-factoring while building on the current system the users already understand wouldn't be a much more cost effective strategy. When I see the clunky interfaces that so many workers are saddled with these days, it makes me sad.
  • Nicholas_C 9y ago
    I used to work for a finance department that tried to implement a fancy driver based tool to replace an endless amount of spreadsheets. We spent so many hours and I’m sure a lot of money on the software license and consultants who built it and in the end it just wasn’t flexible enough.
• ThinkingGuy 9y ago
  "If I increase the page number, our sales go up. I'm on to something.." http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12 http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12
• bitwisebob 9y ago
  While we're talking about Excel: Are there any good tools available for version control and/or diffing of spreadsheets? If my coworker updates a formula in cell E3 and emails it to be, is there any way for me to know what changed?
  • will_pseudonym 9y ago
    Spreadsheet Compare is built into Excel/Office. It's a relatively unknown tool since it came out in 2013. See: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spreadsheet-Compare-f2b20af8-a6d3-4780-8011-f15b3229f5d8 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spre...
  • bjoerns 9y ago
    We (disclaimer: I'm the co-founder) have developed a Git-based add-on for Excel workbooks. Basically, it starts where Git left off in the Excel world. Here's a short blog post how it works out for one of our open source projects: https://www.xltrail.com/blog/xlwings-is-now-on-xltrail https://www.xltrail.com/blog/xlwings-is-now-on-xltrail
  • majkinetor 9y ago
    Excel shared workbook is versioned and comes OTB. You can see user edits, old cell value and new one. It gets latest data on save and even does merge
• jstewartmobile 9y ago
  This is just an ad for the cloud services they mentioned. Suits whining about not having absolute control over every scrap of information is not news.
• golemotron 9y ago
  This article could have been written 20 years ago, and it probably was in some other form.
• braywill 9y ago
  "[Microsoft] wouldn’t comment on what share of [Office 365] customers are using the program for financial analysis and accounting. Good, I would be concerned if they knew exactly what each customer was using their software for.
• otakucode 9y ago
  This is everywhere. This is the reason I say that every company and organization, whether they realize it or not, needs software engineers. The things that grow (and they do grow rather than being built) in the absence of access to software engineers are overly complex and fragile.
  • ksk 9y ago
    Do software engineers want to work on these problems though? IME, we all love to work on problems one step higher than our current level.
• supergreg 9y ago
  I remember one IronPython book that made a spreadsheet application that allowed the user to use python itself for the spreadsheet functions. I think it was a great idea. The software itself was available for download for a time.
  • sundaysailor 9y ago
    There was a startup called Resolver Sytems pursuing this. They meanwhile abandoned it in favor of a different project but did open-source it: https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet
• rdiddly 9y ago
  Pretty much every CRUD app I've ever written was to replace something that was already being done in Excel, and the reason was always to get more of one or more things a RDBMS gives you. So I can say this from a knowing place: good freaking luck replacing Excel's other capabilities. 30 years of work by thousands of Microsoft devs is not easily replaced. It's like a moat around their business that they built by brute force.
• beezle 9y ago
  This really sounds like another case of whats old is new again. In a way, I think it speaks a bit to the obsolecence of what used to be 'systems professionals' that things have swung so far into the end user domain. If the finance team (and I have been part of one early in my career at a major conglomerate) is doing essentially the same repetitive analysis on periodic data sets, it is their bad for not reaching out to their systems people for a better way. Those types of reporting can be canned at a much earlier level and output generated/delivered in the desired format directly to the end users. And nothing precludes still making data available for new types of analysis. Excel is great for small operations, ad hoc stuff and just quick and dirty work (a REPL of sorts as others have said). But not as a primary/crucial reporting tool for large operations.
• tmaly 9y ago
  I have produced thousands of reports in excel format in the financial services industry. If there were an easier api to just have an excel sheet pull/push data from/to a web service, this would be the best of both worlds. The interface is very familiar for many professionals, its just a matter of coordinating and working off a the same data.
  • osullivj 9y ago
    My side project does this by serverizing Excel sheets. Take a look at my profile for links.
• TomMasz 9y ago
  In my experience the problem with Excel is it gets used as a database often because there are more Excel gurus than DB gurus. The Excel guru in my department had to update his version of Office to 64-bit and add RAM because our spreadsheets were getting too large. Even he admits that Excel isn't the best choice for this but we laid off all the Access/SQL people years ago.
• fragsworth 9y ago
  Just something I discovered recently that entirely takes care of the problem if you have ONE PERSON who knows how to code: Google Sheets with the IMPORTHTML() function. You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML function. It populates your spreadsheet automatically, and then you can show graphs and other various things. And it will update on its own! There you have it! Single source of truth! And you still get to use a spreadsheet! It's a fucking beautiful, elegant solution to the entire "Excel problem" that I don't see enough people using. Instead they're going with enterprise 3rd party "solutions", like Anaplan. Who knows how much money they're blowing because the execs don't know tech...
  • wiradikusuma 9y ago
    You mean the function inside your Doc(ument) will periodically fetch the http://myweb.com/periodically_generated.csv http://myweb.com/periodically_generated.csv? Can't you just "push" to the target Doc(ument) instead?
    • fragsworth 9y ago
      Yes, IMPORTHTML fetches your csv, but you can have your CSV populated by your server dynamically on each request. You can't push to a Google Sheet as far as I know. But polling is just as good for these purposes, your data will be up to a few minutes old. If you want true live data then you should use something else, but that's not what the finance chiefs are complaining about. They want people to stop manually importing CSV data because it's really slow, and causes lots of errors. EDIT: I was going off the assumption that there was actually a database somewhere. Turns out they're using Excel as the database. I'd still argue that one person who codes can fix it. Take your Excel sheets, put them into an SQL database, and dump to CSV for importing to Google Docs for graph/display purposes.
  • roadnottaken 9y ago
    Unless I'm missing something, this only provides a way to display data from a database. But users cannot write to the database via the Google Sheet, and it thus doesn't solve the problem...
• wiradikusuma 9y ago
  As the founder of my own startup, I'm forced to use Excel to do financial projection, etc, essentially all materials for my pitch deck. The only thing that worries me is accidentally doing something wrong without knowing what has changed -- stupid things like accidentally pressing Spacebar and Enter on an important cell. Because of this, I keep looking Undo just to make sure my last step is what I intended to do. I use IntelliJ and Git, so you know what I'm missing.
• killjoywashere 9y ago
  I think "don't use Excel" is the wrong solution. The answer is to develop some clear metrics around when to migrate off Excel. We use some pretty big spreadsheets, and they're fine for the intended purpose.
• tolger 9y ago
  There are things that Excel is good for and some that it's not. This article seems like it's blaming the tool instead of the people who are using it incorrectly. Also I laughed when one of the complaints was "Older versions of Excel don't allow multiple users to collaborate on the same document". Well, is that Excel's fault, or should they just go and get the latest version?
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    IKR. And "On the other hand, older versions of Google Sheets, well, didn't exist"
• alexilliamson 9y ago
  Something that almost always gets left out of these discussions is how quickly you can spin a new dataset into a highly polished, ready-to-print-for-executive-review report IF YOU HAVE MASTERED EXCEL HOTKEYS. For context, I have meaningful experience doing data analysis using various combinations of SQL, python, ruby, R/tidyverse, and excel with lightning-fast fingers. In a previous role, I regularly needed to summarize new datasets to executives, and I found that nothing was quicker and more flexible than the following workflow: copying and pasting raw data into an unformatted "data" sheet, creating a new sheet from a well-formatted template, and quickly writing whatever "SUMIFS" prototypes I needed then filling out the rest of the sheet by copying those formulas across cells. Often excel users are stereotyped as having error-prone, sporadic workflows where they are often mistakenly writing over raw data, etc. And that is often a valid stereotype. However, I believe that there exist scenarios where excel is part of the optimal workflow.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  Doesn’t excel allow using any data source for the data? So you can e.g populate a table from a web service/database etc? The thing with excel is that it’s repl-like and lets you sketch up a solution. If users could build more data driven apps (I don’t doubt it’s possible but it should be easy) like those Access popularized then you could start off using sketch data and finish with using a “single source of truth”.
• linearithmic 9y ago
  One reason why Excel should never be used for anything real is because it lacks type safety. For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry. There are lots of other problems related to type safety as well.
  • ZenoArrow 9y ago
    For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry. There are ways around that. Here's something I just put together as an example: =EXACT(COUNT(A2:A6),COUNTA(A2:A6)) That will only return true if all the cells in range A2:A6 contain numbers. There are other approaches that would work, if that doesn't suit you.
• kfk 9y ago
  The problem is very simple. Everybody understands how to sum cell A1 with cell B1 and have a result in cell C1. Summing arrays, though, like in an R dataframe, is much more difficult to understand. You don't see it and you need to train your brain to think in SQL terms.
• djhworld 9y ago
  I don't think the article is suggesting stop using spreadsheets - it says some companies are adopting "cloud" based solutions that offer collaboration features and other tools. Not sure if these cloud offerings have the same breadth of features that Excel has as I've never used them, but Workviva seems to be some sort of cloud based spreadsheet and analytics tool.
• AmericanOP 9y ago
  Find me a cloud database with a good GUI for read/write and I'll get off excel. Databases are meant for tech stacks, not working with lists.
• leroy_masochist 9y ago
  Having read the article, I feel as if the headline is a bit misleading and clickbaity. A more accurate headline in terms of the article's contents would be something like, "Stop Using Excel For ERP, CRM, And Workflow-Based Use Cases, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs". Or to be extra snarky, "Follow Known Best Practices, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs". Not that attention should not be paid to the article's subject matter -- there is SO MUCH wood to chop in terms of helping enterprise customers run their companies better and/or get rid of inefficiency and general jankiness.
• pcsanwald 9y ago
  When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it kept the analysts happy, who were all masterful excel users and thus very efficient and happy with it. Joel Spolsky's essay "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" comes to mind.
• mschuster91 9y ago
  This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever. In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority) usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever... especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel without any due diligence, the staff looks at the software and decides it's crap and continues to use Excel => CFO gets mad because no one uses the expensive software. If you don't believe me, just ask yourselves how Oracle, IBM and Accidenture are still in business despite numerous highly expensive and publicized failures. It's all due to CxO pampering (in addition to a bit of vendor lock in).
  • 1_2__4 9y ago
    This 1000%. The companies you mentioned don’t innovate on tech, they innovate on sucking up to executives and convincing them to buy things that the executive’s own staff recommends against. They have extraordinarily well-oiled sales machinery that deftly bypasses any kind of sanity checking inside the customer’s company and devote all their efforts to keeping it running.
  • sidcool 9y ago
    What's Accidenture?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • Sylos 9y ago
      He probably means Accenture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
    • mschuster91 9y ago
      "Nickname" for Accenture, an IT consulting/bodyshop famous for delivering stuff at waaay less than acceptable quality (or not delivering at all). In addition they're also known for exploiting their employees. See also http://exposingevilempire.com/ http://exposingevilempire.com/.
• c3534l 9y ago
  Accountants invented spreadsheets. Programmers made electronic spreadsheet programs. The reason why spreadsheets are so popular among otherwise not technically people is because it was developed by business people over the course of centuries. Unfortunately, if you're not technically inclined and someone gives you a big hammer, at a certain point you're gonna have to stop hammering everything you encounter and learn how to use a screwdriver.
• stevebmark 9y ago
  Huh, I thought only TechCrunch was the advertising "news" secret arm of Silicon Valley investors? I didn't realize the WSJ did advertising "news" pieces also.
• sandGorgon 9y ago
  After building a couple of years of financial systems, I have a hypothesis - if you could build a Jupyter Notebook with an editable spreadsheet view that is backed by a database and has something like Atom editor Teletype's CRDT (conflict free replicated data types) to enable collaboration...that would be an Excel killer. Incidentally, there are a lot of people who move from Excel to Salesforce ! Because of the ability to program it like an Excel sheet.
• yeukhon 9y ago
  I used to be in the camp “oh you know Excel and PowerPoint, ahah!” But working full time and having to create Excel spreadhseets on a regular basis as an engineer (mainly for budgeting and capacity plannig, but also do some schedule/timeline display), I have to say once you know how to cross reference things in Excel, life saver... Automating spreadsheet creation has helped save hours of manual recompiling every quarter (do this Python is pretty pleasant). Yes. The scrolling and wrapping really sucks, but nonetheless everyone understands excels. I have been given tours and free trials from SaaS companies to try their AWS budgeting interface. They are great for some (like some prettt graph), but just not easy and flexible at all.
• deusofnull 9y ago
  Sounds like their workflow is the problem, not their tool. I'm no shill for Excel, but it is without a doubt powerful and can be quite programmatic. Maybe Excel could get a plugin system like Atom or VS Code or Sublime that could handle integration with centralized platforms / databases. Just wondering: can you make an API call / ORM query to a database from within Excel macros? How much I/O can you do with macros?
  • zbentley 9y ago
    You can do basically anything I/O within an Excel macro (VBA script): You can talk to a database: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-new-database-connection https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-new-databas... Interact with the filesystem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-text-file-line-by-line-in-vba https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-text... Open arbitrary sockets, with some caveats: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-winsock-event-handling-in-visualbasic https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-winsock... And more!
• smallnamespace 9y ago
  Have seen Excel derivatives pricers that ran long Monte Carlo simulations (yes, RAND() is often good enough) that took several minutes -- press F9 for a new estimate of a price, as well as simplified stripped-down pricers that got within 0.001% of our real internal pricing system but was nicely laid out and explainable to clients. The only thing that Excel is awkward at is unlimited recursion. For everything else, if you can't turn your computation into a nicely laid-out spreadsheet, then you probably don't understand your problem well enough to explain to others. Had a fun time doing many of the Euler problems in Excel, even though they theoretically many require recursion. Oftentimes I got the answer more quickly and easily than in Python.
• Dowwie 9y ago
  This story has less to do with Excel than it does having staff capable of using technology
• wils1245 9y ago
  >Kayla Davis, who runs financial planning at ABM Industries, relied on Excel to pull data from a motley of disparate accounting systems "Motley of disparate accounting systems" is your problem, not Excel. Heavy Excel use/misuse by end analysts is a symptom of poor data practices, not a cause. If Excel is being used to compile and distribute complicated/big/important reports, it's extremely likely they lack better and more coherent tools and data sources.
• VikingCoder 9y ago
  "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -African Proverb Desktop apps like Excel are fabulous at letting you work alone with data in front of you. But they are a shitstorm of horror when you try to work with other people, collecting data from multiple places. And sure, Office 365 is a step in the right direction, but it's not nearly enough. Google Sheets is slightly better, but it's still not enough. To be frank, the same way that "anyone can do SQL," we've fallen into a trap of thinking "anyone can do Excel," and it's just not true. And no amount of improving the commercial product Excel will make it work for businesses like they need, in my opinion. At some point you need to hire engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, process engineers, business analysts, etc., to help you manage your data. Asking people to "Learn Excel" in order to replace a real team of qualified domain experts is folly.
• muxator 9y ago
  I used to joke with my colleagues that you never have to write "Excel" in your CV :) Now that I am grown up a bit, I recognize it can be useful. The real life problem, for me, is recognizing when comes the moment to stop sending spreadsheets by mail and write software, instead. Or buy it. Lots of people buy sofware, they tell me. Why don't they feel the pleasure of crafting every single bit by themselves?
• Havoc 9y ago
  That's not happening. There is currently simply no viable substitute. (And don't tell me LibreOffice). Excel's mindshare is off the charts in the finance world. Even if LibreOffice was anywhere close - it wouldn't matter...the finance staff wants what they already know & since they approve the $$$ they usually get what they want. For certain tasks other applications may be more suitable, but as a general swiss army knife it's here to stay We use Google sheets at work too - almost exclusively for shared trackers though which don't require any serious functionality.
• banku_brougham 9y ago
  No one has yet mentioned the shortcut keys, so I'll add this dimension. When you show up to work on wall street, your new buddies will yank the mouse out of your machine and remove the F1 key. Then you can begin your apprenticeship with a fresh perspective. The point is, you can be incredibly productive in excel against a very large problem space. It can't handle GB datasets, but once you have filtered down to a manageable size you can answer questions via ad-hoc analysis, automate financial reporting documents, solve multivariable regressions, run machine learning algorithms (see 'Data Smart') etc. with aplomb. I understand the objections to the data model and its inappropriate uses, but excel can take raw data from disparate sources to finished documentation for regulatory requirements and helps you automate most of that -- I don't think the finance industry is going to move away from it. I certainly don't perceive an understanding of the costs involved with building a different way. >“I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said I hear this complaint all the time from business leadership, Mr. Garrett doesn't seem to understand that extracting/munging/preprocessing and then analyzing data is inextricable from the end product which is visibility and understanding at the business leader level. There isn't a follow-up to say Mr. Garret is hiring data engineers and software developers to serve the now-liberated 'data focusers'. I'm very skeptical that these sentiments are different than the past, or are a signal of changing times ahead. Lastly, I'd to share the following funny snippet from the reprehensible though satirical leveraged sellout blog: >I turned and tapped Josh on the shoulder to get his attention. I didn’t say a word, but my face said “Yo…yeah you, McKposer.” We locked eyes. I slowly and dramatically reached for my mouse cable. Staring him down, I methodically unplugged it from my computer’s USB port. The cable came out slowly but smoothly and with it’s final, climactic release, I heard Josh gulp with fear. >I continued to glare at him as I started to “fly around.” My eyeballs burned through his unweathered, 60-hour-a-week-when-he-should-have-done-90 face as I hid and unhid sheets and conditionally formatted and applied validation to cells with triple nested conditional and indirect functions and then culminated by on-the-fly writing a macro that took my data and made it into a Marimekko (and we don’t even use that shit!). I never turned to look at the screen, and my eyes never left his.
• evantahler 9y ago
  There are lots of great tools to solve the single source of truth problem. foe example, I've used Looker (which is connected to our data warehouse) to spit out JSON feeds or CSVs which excell and google sheets can live-import. Doing this gives us the best of both worlds
• cjlars 9y ago
  Put simply, Excel is excellent as a terminal node in any data pipeline, but poor as an intermediate node. Open speadsheet -> human plays with data -> human makes decision = good. Open spreadsheet -> human plays with data -> automated process pulls data further along in data pipeline = bad.
• jokoon 9y ago
  Shouldn't you be able to do the same thing R does with excel? I mean at some point if you cannot teach everyone a programming language, you can at least give them some tool that can do a similar job. Teaching programming is so expensive, the money has always been into making programming just easier and easier.
• muthusk 9y ago
  This CFO should talk to CIO - before making such a blunt statement. So one silver bullet to solve all the problems.
• px1999 9y ago
  This is just an ad for workiva, right?
• nmstoker 9y ago
  "Keep checking plurals readers tell headline writers" springs to mind as a response! But, joking aside, Excel is the most amazingly useful and adaptable tool but it's incredible how many obvious improvements have been left out. Parts of it are stuck in the stone age. As others have mentioned, version control and information flow are hugely limited with it and there's a real feeling that it went backwards for things like charting (I suspect it's partly that other methods are now more intuitive). And why on earth don't they do something (anything) to make pressing F1 not be such an annoying experience...
• Yhippa 9y ago
  > “You’re still going to use Excel for the things you’re not using a tailored solution for,” he said. I was shocked to hear about my old company still using Excel heavily for key business operations. I think those are the ones that should be replaced by bespoke software. On the other hand what likely happens is you need a way to quickly perform some analytical task and your company doesn't have the process or speed to whip up some software quickly. After seeing how a lot of Fortune 500 companies work I'm not sure they ever will with compliance and other regulations in the way. Excel is very accessible and will probably be the way businesses whip up analyses in the face of business fire-drills unless they have software engineers embedded in their teams or they get their current staff to learn how to code.
• robert-wallis 9y ago
  It seems like using Google Sheets or the online Excel is the answer. Single source of truth, collaboration, and keep the same fundemental tools.
• mrmondo 9y ago
  As someone in a systems / ops engineering role it frustrates me endlessly when someone sends me information / data in the form of an excel spreadsheet or a word document. My only are the applications slow and buggy (unless I’m guessing you’re running Windows?) the file format is very hard to work with / from if you want to do anything with it outside the vendors application, data quickly becomes stale and it’s not easy to populate automatically using standard tooling let alone share the information generated there from in an accessible, digestible format.
• Schwolop 9y ago
  In my enterprise, PowerBI, Flow, and Powerapps are the microsoft products helping to move data out of excel, or at least helping to make it visual and shareable. If any of those products grows a more user friendly model for _thinking_ about how to do things (Flow is arguably the closest) they could revolutionise how things are done here. PowerBI has enormous power to express data as stories, but the technical hurdles are still high. It's not _harder_ than excel, but there's a competency cliff.
• rconti 9y ago
  Shudder This reminds me of my 2 months working for a Big 4 accounting firm in, basically, SOX auditing. We mapped out controls on our little 14" laptop screens using excel spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows and hundreds if not thousands of columns. I'd say we were writing novels in Excel but, to be honest, there were probably far more words than the average novel contained. Talk about using the wrong tool for the job -- and using low-paid monkeys on inadequate equipment rather than developing a proper application for the task (or paying someone else to do the same). I'll never look at excel the same way again.
• raides 9y ago
  It's weird how no one can adopt office365 and online Excel like they can with Google sheets.
• ferdterguson 9y ago
  Python is my day job and I'm very fluent in the common data science tools like Pandas, but you'll hardly ever catch me using Pandas because Excel is just so much easier for 2d data. The thing is, I never use Excel because the data I work with every day is almost always multidimensional, so I work with xarray[1]. It drives me crazy to see coworkers using Excel for things that it is not suitable for and having crazy solutions like multiple tables per sheet, multiple sheets, multiple files or other hacks to describe another dimension of data. [1] http://xarray.pydata.org http://xarray.pydata.org
• beefield 9y ago
  One step forward to manage spreadsheets would be if there was a way to enforce relational database table looking sheets. I mean, you should be able to lock a sheet in a way that anything you enter to a column must be of same type, you can't addd random formulas wherever, but you need to add data one row at a time, if you miss primary key, no other changes are allowed, if you have a defined formula for a column, it is guaranteed to be the same in all data rows etc.
• osrec 9y ago
  Deploying Excel in production is like deploying a beadboard in a piece of consumer electronics. You just give away too much control to keep your deployment robust. Having said that, Excel is an excellent tool - just not for everything under the sun!
• hayksaakian 9y ago
  “Excel just wasn’t designed to do some of the heavy lifting that companies need to do in finance,” said Paul Hammerman, a business applications analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors. The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE . This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training. --- reads like a "submarine http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• petervandijck 9y ago
  In our 150-people team as part of a 1,500 people company, we use a ton of Excel, but a significant part of our structured data is in https://airtable.com https://airtable.com, which I can't recommend high enough. It combines the structured-ness of a database with the ease of use of a spreadsheet. And it lets you slowly evolve your datamodel (we adjust fields/tables every few months and it usually only takes 15 minutes).
• fpisfun 9y ago
  I hate Excel, can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm a big Google sheets fan when it's used with their apps scripts. You can do a lot using the sheet as a data store combined with functional JavaScript.
  • dbg31415 9y ago
    Look, I hear you... I love Google Docs over Microsoft Word... and for simple things I like Google Sheets. But given how much shit is in Excel, and how many edges cases have just been worked out already in Excel... man sometimes it's just nice to have Excel. Want to de-dupe a list? There's a button for that in Excel. (I know there are tools... but look my point is just that it's so much easier in Excel.) Want to convert some list of dates that were saved based on a 1904 calendar over? Easy, Excel even offers to do it when you paste. Google docs? Yeah not so much. You're left doing this by hand... 4 years and 1 day off... ugh. Want to see all the formulas and know how they work? You get only so much visibility into the apps for Google Sheets... I don't really want to run code / grant access to things unless I know what they are doing. Not keen on adding 3rd party functionality that may be sending my data back to the mother ship. I love me some Google Sheets... but just saying when I need to get shit done, Excel is usually a slightly more robust experience.
• jujaro 9y ago
  Some time ago Telco carriers used to keep their plant assets data in Excel, PDF, Autocad, images, paper etc. I work for a company that does software to centralize all that info in a database. Once they start using the software the big issue is that they want to keep different versions of the same data all centralized. Sort of a version control system, the complexity of maintaining data integrity in such environment is massive. It is like they would like to return to a decentralized system where they can do whatever they want with their data.
• rahimnathwani 9y ago
  The title is overblown. There's a push to stop using Excel as: * the single source of truth for a set of primary data * the mechanism by which regular (i.e. repeated) reports and analysis are conducted But it overlooks the fact that: * Excel has, for many years, had real-time integration to pull data from many systems (not just 'Export to Excel', but the ability to pull data via ODBC connectors). I've used this, e.g. to pull trial balances from Sage into Excel for custom, but repeated, financial reporting. * You can't beat Excel as a prototyping tool, or for ad hoc analysis from disparate data sources (without a huge learning curve for the people we're talking about). Telling finance/accounting professionals not to use Excel is like telling designers to use D3.js instead of Illustrator. D3 might integrate better with data sources, and be easier to version control and share etc., but for a quick sketch you'll use Illustrator. From the title, you'd assume these 'Finance Chiefs' were expecting none of their staff would even need Excel installed, after some transition period, but this isn't the case. There's always some lag between the needs you have, and the capability of more structured tools.
• markpapadakis 9y ago
  I was toying with this idea in the past, where cells would support, in addition to primitives(numbers, strings, whatever) and functions, a new type which would be identified by a reverse domain name notation path/key (e.g org.hr.employees.cnt), and optionally a comma separated (key-value) pairs as arguments. Whenever a value for such a unique (key, arguments) cell would be required, the application would collect all such that need updates -- or, you could click a button to update them all --, create a message that would contain all paths and arguments, and auth info (each user would require to authenticate with some centralized system, so that the auth key would be used for that RPC, and that the service could check for authentication and authorization ), call out to some service and get values for each of those cells (value could depend on the authenticated user, or could even be denied depending on privileges ). Furthermore, the application would cache each such cell value (auth key, resource path, arguments digest, value) and it would periodically update them, or do so on demand (so that you can use it say on a plane, and refresh them when you land). That’s the gist of it, but there’s more to it and there are some optimization opportunities I am ignoring here, but it could work. Then again, for all I know, there are already such services, or apps that kind of do this sort of thing.
• Myrmornis 9y ago
  In the article, and in these comments, are people distinguishing between Excel and Google Sheets, or are they lumping them both together as “excel”? Where I work I don’t think anyone uses Excel, but Google Sheets is common.
• dagaci 9y ago
  Workiva's stock price has jump to an all time high after the wall street journal article. This is great news for them ;)
• known 9y ago
  We can use Excel as long as we are aware of its limits/loopholes e.g. http://0.30000000000000004.com/ http://0.30000000000000004.com/
• jasonmaydie 9y ago
  They had me until the part where they complained about using old versions excel. Then upgrade it, and while you are at it upgrade your windows XP machines too. Why are these companies complaining about using old software when they are the ones who are always last to upgrade?
• TheGorramBatman 9y ago
  This sounds like an ad.
• jimnotgym 9y ago
  One killer missing feature in Excel for me is proper UTF-8 support. Connect Excel to your db, save a csv file to import to your website and say goodbye to your umlauts!
• nautilus12 9y ago
  Why does this feel so much like sponsored content for Workiva?
• k3a 9y ago
  Paid advertising? I use LibreOffice and it fullfills all my needs. I understand, there may ve different needs in big corporations, of course. But that doesn't mean "everyone should stop using Excel and buy our cloud SW", sigh.
• laughfactory 9y ago
  Excel is remarkable, yes, but I'd argue that given its nature pretty much every reasonably complex workbook can be expected to have at least one bug. Having worked with them a lot in many different contexts, I've seen just how easily errors are introduced and I think they should never be used for research or finance where the cost of errors is high. At it's core the issue is that it's really hard to create variations and tests which can tell you if something is wrong... Much harder than it is to do this in a normal programming paradigm. Yes, the barrier to entry is lower, but the trade-off is much increased error rate and ongoing brittleness. Even if it's "right" at one point there's no guarantee it will be right in the future. What if someone copies/pastes data into a crucial worksheet and misses a column? It's so incredibly easy to screw up!
• pq0ak2nnd 9y ago
  Sweet! I'm going to make a note of these companies and in three years get hired when they decide aborting Excel was a huge mistake and need to unfuck their non-excel system.