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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

by 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.
  - brazzledazzle 9y ago
    The web editor might be good enough today but it used to choke and wouldn’t open/render all kinds of stuff that’s normal in financial spreadsheets. Thats not even getting into what a shit show SharePoint has been over the years. Microsoft has slowly eroded trust in anything but email sharing and (if there haven’t been missteps within an org with them) file shares.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    PlanSpreadsheetFinal2ReallyFinal2016_2(1).xslx
beobab 9y ago
This is a key point. It's easy to branch data, but painful to merge it.
cortesoft 9y ago
How do you even HAVE a source of truth? You email a spreadsheet to two people, and the both want to work on it... which one is the source of truth? They each have modified the original, and we want to keep both changes. I mean, this is the problem that distributed version control was designed to solve. Emailing a spreadsheet around and calling one a source of truth doesn’t solve the simultaneous edits problem.

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.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  The web editor might be good enough today but it used to choke and wouldn’t open/render all kinds of stuff that’s normal in financial spreadsheets. Thats not even getting into what a shit show SharePoint has been over the years. Microsoft has slowly eroded trust in anything but email sharing and (if there haven’t been missteps within an org with them) file shares.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  PlanSpreadsheetFinal2ReallyFinal2016_2(1).xslx

beobab 9y ago

This is a key point. It's easy to branch data, but painful to merge it.

cortesoft 9y ago

How do you even HAVE a source of truth? You email a spreadsheet to two people, and the both want to work on it... which one is the source of truth? They each have modified the original, and we want to keep both changes. I mean, this is the problem that distributed version control was designed to solve. Emailing a spreadsheet around and calling one a source of truth doesn’t solve the simultaneous edits problem.