7 ms·

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 tal

• 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.
    • gaius 9y ago
      Look on the "Get & Transform" tab
  • jasode 9y ago
    >easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds. Yes it seems that way but many spreadsheets exist because the centralized system is an incomplete solution. For example, a company might have a "human resources tracking" centralized system. (E.g. Ariba, Peoplesoft, etc). It has some standard features like ingesting resumes and extracting "skills" from parsing MS Word docs, etc. However, the company happens to use a interviewing process where the candidate must pass (1) phone interview and (2) onsite with 5 peer programmers, and (3) hiring manager. The hiring manager wants to "capture" all of those states (phone_passed=True/False, peer interviews with 5 different numerical scores, manager_pass=True/False). The centralized system doesn't have fields that capture all that so the hiring manager creates a spreadsheet that has those extra columns. Many spreadsheets out in the wild "fill the gap" between incomplete centralized systems and custom IT programming. An adhoc xls file can be created far faster than submitting a change request to the corporate IT department to customize Ariba -- which could take months (or never) to implement. Or spreadsheets act as the "intersection" of data between multiple systems. Again, one purpose of centralized "data warehouses" was to eliminate Excel "data silos" but again, no IT department can create data warehouse solutions (which also includes all the custom reports) as fast as someone creating spreadsheets and just emailing them around. Having a hybrid process where Excel acts as a round-trip offline client to a central db doesn't really eliminate the fundamental reason Excel (over)use keeps multiplying like rabbits.
    • 9y ago
• TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  > 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". It wasn't very long ago that I realized that my two decades in IT could be summed up as: making proper applications out of Excel workbooks with feeble macros. I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux zealot, but dang if they didn't create a world in which I've made a career. Where I'm at now, I'm drowning in opportunities to ameliorate horrific Excel-based workflows, and I'm fairly confident that there's enough work out there to last me until another 20 years to retirement.
  • jasode 9y ago
    >making proper applications out of Excel workbooks Yes, exactly. If we're being uncharitable, we can spin Greenspun's 10th rule[1] of programming as: >"Any sufficiently complicated Excel spreadsheet contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a proper centralized database." Or, if we're being charitable, we frame it as an internal MVP (Minimum Viable Product): >"Spreadsheets are the internal 'mvp' that proves the business value before you build the centralized systems. When the spreadsheet becomes unmaintable spaghetti formulas and the xls email workflow crushes under its own weight, that will give the company the evidence and the confidence to spend $1 million and migrate the spreadsheet to a proper centralized database." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
    • wainstead 9y ago
      Henceforth known as "jasode's corollary."
    • fjsolwmv 9y ago
      A database is not a spreadsheet replacement. A database backed application is a spreadsheet replacement.
    • ComodoHacker 9y ago
      >that will give the company the evidence and the confidence to spend $1 million and migrate the spreadsheet to a proper centralized database ...along with understanding that migrating at earlier stage would cost only $100K.
• solatic 9y ago
  > 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 the principal way you sell centralized systems to users isn't in the ease of manipulating results but in the ease / automation of data entry. The whole pain point and problem with Excel is in manual data entry, and having a single source of truth, even if you succeed in enforcing its property as a single source of truth, does not automatically solve disagreements between different human sources of data. That's why tools like Grafana have interesting futures for business users, because they enforce a clear separation between data sources and data visualization, while offering a lot of control to the end user over statistical manipulations and visualizations that they can create, and keeping those visualizations updated in real time, so that they don't have to be re-prepared every time period for some new report.
• euyyn 9y ago
  Alternatively, use Google Sheets :) Centralized, single source of truth spreadsheets.
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    Google Sheets is great and makes sense for a lot of vanilla use cases, but even in its current form, doesn't hold a candle to Excel running on a Windows machine when it comes to doing anything even slightly fancy or non-trivial.
    • chaostheory 9y ago
      That's not true. Like newer versions of Excel, you can use Javascript on Google Sheets now https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets It's better than Excel's VBA. Also Google Sheets has an API for stuff like Python.
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        Excel can cover many use cases with just with UI workflows without requiring its users to actually learn programming. Only the very advanced users turn to VBA programming.
    • newbear 9y ago
      Example of fancy or non-trivial?
• chaostheory 9y ago
  Google Sheets and other similar web apps replicate most if not all of the Excel features you just listed, and it's centralized and more than one person can work on it simultaneously.
• guiomie 9y ago
  "One middle ground between Excel data silos and the utopia of a centralized system is a shared document store like Sharepoint or Dropbox." ... 100% agree, and add I find that Google Sheet is the best for this role: 1 source of truth, modification history, read/write permissions and shareable. I am now starting to use spreadsheets for use cases I would have strongly objected in the past. I'm surprised Google sheet isn't more mainstream.
  • askvictor 9y ago
    And an API that lets data be used in other 'real' applications
• unixhero 9y ago
  For qualitative data management, but numerical analysis, 1 source of truth collaboratively - I use Atlassian Jira with great success. Got a complex work stream? Got thousand small problems that needs to be slowly figured out over 50 different main topics? Got a team of 2,50 or 1000? No problem. 1. Just set up a bunch of jira entries while tagging them with the same labels 2. set up filters on these labels. 3. Set up dashboard(s) that give a complete realtime/update to any inquiring user. Need to report status? No problem, screenshot of the Dashboard and done. It's really great tbh.
• eighthnate 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. Yep. Even if they get centralize data via RDBMs like SQL Server or even god forbid Microsoft Access, office workers are going to want the front-end of that data to be excel. There is too much knowledge investment in excel for many office workers to want to switch.
• pitay 9y ago
  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. What about Business Intelligence products such as Hyperion? They can provide reports from a defined data model which gets data directly from the database. People can create their pivots and other transformations on the data fairly easily. Is their something that Excel offers that makes it much better than one of these Business Intelligence products in certain situations?
  • mickronome 9y ago
    Excel offers a few things in most scenarios, primarily because that any enforced structure always implies lost flexibility, and one of the issues often quoted with Excel is the lack of enforcement of using the right structures and data sources. A simple one: If I have been asked to do a report, but it turns out I don't have the correct access rights to some data, my manager can simply send it to me in an Excel sheet, or he can log an issue with IT to change the acess rights to a specific key/dimension/hierarchy. The 'one true data source' move often correspond to tighter access controls when good auditing really would have been the correct solution, hence the above situation is fairly common.
    • pitay 9y ago
      Thanks very much for the info that Excel may offer least friction in a lot of circumstances, especially when ad-hoc things need to be done with data.