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> 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 track

> 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.
starik36 9y ago
That is exactly right. Many moons ago large bank I worked at purchased a company and soon it became apparent that their entire business ran on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with 30,000 lines of really dense, uncommented, unindented, spaghetti LotusScript code spread over 2 or 3 functions. The kicker is it would only run in the 16-bit edition of the product for whatever reason. So we had to have a VM to run it in because Windows 2000 had a problem with either Lotus 1-2-3 16 bit edition or the spreadsheet itself. So yeah, stop abusing Excel - Lotus 1-2-3 in this case.

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.

starik36 9y ago

That is exactly right. Many moons ago large bank I worked at purchased a company and soon it became apparent that their entire business ran on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with 30,000 lines of really dense, uncommented, unindented, spaghetti LotusScript code spread over 2 or 3 functions. The kicker is it would only run in the 16-bit edition of the product for whatever reason. So we had to have a VM to run it in because Windows 2000 had a problem with either Lotus 1-2-3 16 bit edition or the spreadsheet itself. So yeah, stop abusing Excel - Lotus 1-2-3 in this case.