11 ms·

For non-programmers, usually the duct tape is a spreadsheet. I have seen people who invent a CRM on a spreadsheet while not knowing what CRM means. Looking for

For non-programmers, usually the duct tape is a spreadsheet. I have seen people who invent a CRM on a spreadsheet while not knowing what CRM means. Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel.

fiatjaf 9y ago
90% of the people who invent a CRM on a spreadsheet are better off using that flexible spreadsheet they know very well and can change, add or remove features, store anywhere they want etc. than using a stupid CRM software with 3 features, designed around its creator limited imagination only.
- ENGNR 9y ago
  Microsoft Access used to be the real test. By the time they've added a UI and started to get frustrated with one user at a time it's time for a CRUD app and a database
- lev99 9y ago
  The person that invents the CRM spreadsheet is better off. However, that spreadsheet is usually harder to share with the rest of the company. If the spreadsheet has more than 1 user than it might be worth a SaaS.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Just use a google sheet and you’re good for a long time.
    - lev99 9y ago
      It depends. Sheets with multiple users is a bad smell to me.
- reificator 9y ago
  Yeah. Until they leave for another job and literally no one else in the company can understand the ad-hoc process unintentionally developed over five years of "let's just add this here". Which is not to say that whatever replaces it is guaranteed to be better, but it will at least have a good start by using the right tools for the job.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- wil421 9y ago
  How is a spreadsheet scalable for a large organization? The team or person might be better off but CRMs and other tools help the organization standardize their processes. What happens when this person leaves? What if business starts booming and you need to scale up? Are you really better off sharing a spreadsheet between a 100 or more people?
  - Endy 9y ago
    > How is a spreadsheet scalable for a large organization? Just gonna focus on this part here. The last offices I worked in (and the last places I even dealt with tech stuff beyond teaching it to primary-schoolers), "Track Changes" was simply a godsend. One person "owned" the spreadsheet and could allow use or not; and we had it hosted on OneDrive - of course we all had the OneDrive client on our work PCs and it could tie into Excel natively, so we were all using the same document. If the entirety of a large org needs the same spreadsheet, you're probably looking at a scenario where they really need multiple sheets, but haven't figured out how to do references to other files and sheets yet. But using Track Changes and having one person designated as Owner so that that one individual makes a decision to approve/disapprove all potential changes makes it much easier to let multiple people work together. > What happens when this person leaves? That's a management / succession-planning issue. Ad-hoc solutions shouldn't be kept secret, and allowing employees to just go off and do as they please in that regard is a major issue. If all work-related documents are required to be stored in the company cloud, and you storing a new doc alerts your manager, etc., you'll be able to deal with this much easier. One place I worked for a few weeks on a project did a reset on employee's terminals every Friday at around 7PM, and anyone who claimed they lost data or progress from that on Monday was in trouble, because they didn't save company-related data to the document & data server (which obviously did not get reset) - meaning they'd done something against company policy that they'd been told about the day they were hired.
- realusername 9y ago
  The issue for the spreadsheet is always around data-integrity, people start typing random things in their Excel and then it's a mess to try to make sense of the data. I would not mind Excel much if it was strongly typed instead.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    But being strongly typed would remove a lot of the usability that makes Excel the most widely used programming language among non programmers.
    - beefield 9y ago
      I think there would be space for a middle ground solution where you could define a sheet "type" to something like "datatable" that would enforce data types on columns, only allow data entered a row at a time and if calculated columns were there, would enforce same formula in each row.
  - paulryanrogers 9y ago
    Isn't that what Microsoft Access was?
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    Perhaps there's something to try in that space.
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
Perhaps google trends might be useful (is there some API?) for example "how do i sort a list of customers in excel?" How do i track shipping containers in excel?
expertentipp 9y ago
I encountered situations in corporate environment where a couple of questions with an answer selected from predefined list (radiobuttons/dropdown) were made in Excel... of course completely broken without the latest office on windows and outside of the intranet...
IAmEveryone 9y ago
I was actually toying with the idea of replacing our custom-made, rather limited shop system with something entirely based on Google Sheets. We have rather low requirements, which is why I'm resisting existing shop systems. They all seem like overkill to me. But from time to time, someone wants a some statistics, or needs to send emails to "everyone who bought in the last four weeks". These are trivial for me to compile in SQL, but a spreadsheet would allow others to quickly work with the data. Unfortunately, the Sheets API at around one second per request was too slow for my tastes when I last checked it out.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  You could always schedule regular exports of your data to sheets if you just want it to be easier for others to answer simple questions.
- tlarkworthy 9y ago
  I had a super slow sheet script but I found it had a batch-all-my-changes type of workaround in the API which brought it back into reasonable territory.
beejiu 9y ago
You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. If a spreadsheet works, great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In a similar vein, there are plenty of small software teams that use nothing more than a whiteboard for project management. Yet there are teams tooled up with Jira/Trello/Slack with much less productivity.
- weinzierl 9y ago
  > You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. The opposite is also true: You can make a decent living creating, customizing or even just maintaining domain-specific tools, no matter if the customer's business really needs them or not.
- walshemj 9y ago
  It works until it doesn't work then you are Donald Ducked. I one worked at a place where a key part of the finance system ran on a spreadsheet - turns out this SS had mess up or finances and was one of the reasons the company restructured.
  - tomcooks 9y ago
    Donald Ducked as in royally fubared?
- nraynaud 9y ago
  The problem is external criterions like data recovery, data security, quality control, access control, auditing etc.
  - detritus 9y ago
    *twitches I can't believe I'm about to sink so low, but... criteria! Criterions are what one adds to soup ;)
    - gregknicholson 9y ago
Analemma_ 9y ago
> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. I understand where you're coming from, but this is just not good advice. Somebody (I can't remember if it was pg, Joel Spolsky, or someone else) once wrote an entire essay basically saying "DON'T make a startup that's just pivot tables. I have seen so many SaaS startups fail because they didn't realize they were just selling pivot tables at a much higher price than Microsoft wants for Excel." Also take a look at this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450802 where a whole bunch of people express bafflement of and loathing for people who unnecessarily replace Excel with half-baked software. It seems like a good idea; it's usually not.
- nhebb 9y ago
  That was Joel in his "You Suck at Excel" video.
- jackweirdy 9y ago
  It may also have been in a blog post, but Joel Spolsky makes that remark in his presentation "You Suck at Excel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- weinzierl 9y ago
  > It seems like a good idea; it's usually not. Not for a startup, no, but in my experience it works well as a lifestyle business. Companies pay well for this kind of work and it seems the number of spreadsheets they want to have replaced provide enough work for the next few decades to come. Better the replacement isn't half-baked though...
mud_dauber 9y ago
Love this...
dpandya 9y ago
> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. Strongly disagree with this based on personal experience in "traditional" spaces that rely heavily on spreadsheets. There's a reason most of the financial industry uses Excel spreadsheets and it isn't because they can't afford to pay for specialized software. Excel spreadsheets are incredibly versatile. Your data format can change a little bit over time and you'll still be fine. With a custom software solution, you're kind of stuck within the confines of what the developers/product managers gleaned from your working process.
- saidajigumi 9y ago
  I'll strongly disagree in turn. I personally know some successful founders whose business, in one important facet, could be summed as "get rid of those painful Excel spreadsheets". It's not the use or not of Excel. As with most things, and as TFA discusses, it's about the pain factor. Spreadsheets are, far and away, the greatest success in end-user programming to date. But like all software tools, their usage can grow into painful places. Do the users have massive, error-prone and/or time-consuming workflows built around those spreadsheets? Is it very hard to bring new staff up to speed, or to keep existing staff compliant with process, or to meet day-to-day business goals with those spreadsheets? Is there no solution between "painful spreadsheet" and "$X,000,000 contract w/ bigcorp" to solve those problems? If 'yes' is cropping up in answer to those questions, then lifting the logic from ad-hoc process around spreadsheets into software may be a good idea and/or a good business.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  The basic counter argument to this is software engineering tools. If you have a more than trivial SS you end up needing tests, version control with branches, merge, and rebase, and an automated process for applying both.
- glup 9y ago
  I worked at a mid-size startup where all of the customer-facing people were ex-finance---I was consistently amazed by the stuff they did in Excel using just pivot tables, rudimentary graphing, and (VBA? I don't think you could use Python at the time) scripts to do data cleaning, ad-hoc CRM, even rudimentary procedural generation of web content. 90% were one-offs, so it was totally appropriate to not throw developers at the problems (recurring things eventually got built out as microservices). The main downside was that the functions and transformations weren't sharable across documents, and often there ended up being several mildly tweaked versions of the same functions across a bunch of documents. But I think I learned something about human tool use: when motivated, people will find a way to use the general purpose tools they know to improve individual efficiency.
Angostura 9y ago
Where I work, I big Word document with a table in it, is the duct tape. Using Excel would be the right way.
antoineMoPa 9y ago
When did spreadsheets, a tool that is generic and versatile, become worse than a n$/month SAAS with fancy bootstrap inputs?
- beagle3 9y ago
  When they became effectively impossible to audit. That is, at their inception. I've once worked with a trader whose magic sauce was encoded a spreadsheet he had been developing and carrying around for 10 years. It had tens of thousands of formulas and references cross ~50 sheets. He suspected he had introduced an error somewhere, but gave up after a couple of months of trying to, you know, verify the whole thing.
  - antoineMoPa 9y ago
    Yeah I'd say that If you have a hundred formulas and more than 10 sheets, it is time to change to another tool. But when someone is this far, they'll have accumulated so much technical dept that they will probably have to hire a programmer because the typical SASS won't solve all of their needs.
- bluedino 9y ago
  When each user has a different copy, and nobody knows what the most up to date version is. When you have error-prone processes that you do hundreds of times a day based on those spreadsheets, that a bigger application can automate. When ten of those spreadsheets could really be replaced with one.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  As with most things, its strengths are its weaknesses. Versatility is great, but it's also the enemy of things like standardization, data security and data accessibility. The more people are collaborating, the more those things start to be important.
tyingq 9y ago
If you can get them to use Quickbase/Gsheets/AirTable or similar instead there's a big improvement. Still hacky, but you know what's out there and roughly what it's doing. And better centralized access control and backup.
macintux 9y ago
For the several people reacting negatively to this: the advice isn’t “replace every spreadsheet you find” which would indeed be silly, but “look for spreadsheets as a possible smell that there’s a gap that could be filled”.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  Yeah, and to that I would add another nuance. Even if one does find spreadsheets that "ripe" for a more robust tool-- that still isn't enough. One also has to consider the cost of engaging the IT department or others who can do and/or manage development within the organization. That's NOT cheap. Many businesses can barely manage to handle their own shit, let alone successfully do even a small unplanned project to port an excel app running in somebody's cube to something more robust.
stephengillie 9y ago
My most popular project to date started out as copying videogame player names from a website running "SteamQuery", and pasting into Excel.
wglb 9y ago
I actually had a gig based exactly on this. There was a very complex spreadsheet that was used by an actuarial department of an insurance company that they finally decided to automate. There were .net libraries that could access the spreadsheet components and produce external reports, and put values into a database. Oddly, they kept the spreadsheet component as a the input mechanism.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Oddly? Why is it odd to not want to change from an input method that you already know like the back of your hand? If everyone who’ll be using this relies on the spreadsheet program for most of their work anyway, being able to keep a lot of the process in there makes sense. Learning a new tool is friction.
  - wglb 9y ago
    It was pretty clumsy in its realization. There were like six or seven regions on the one sheet and it was hard to work with. So they kept that part of it.
    - Endy 9y ago
      To be honest, I first learned about using spreadsheets because my mother worked in insurance - not as an actuary but as one of the people under the actuarial department. Lotus 1-2-3 was the norm not only for that office but the industry. As she was retiring, Excel was becoming big (because the standard OS moved from DOS to Windows), and Excel was just starting overtake Lotus. When it's been an SOP for more than 30 years to the point that they can reliably teach the basic use of these sheets in colleges/universities? You're not highly likely to shift it in an established corp.
rdiddly 9y ago
Specifically you need to whittle it down to those uses of Excel where... - one spreadsheet is shared among more than about 5 people (or they each have their own version of it... shudder) - the sheet has more than about 10,000 rows That's the point where Excel truly starts to be not the right answer.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  There's also the case where the spreadsheet contains a whole bunch of endlessly duplicated and error-prone cell logic that nobody really understands, partly designed to work around limitations in the underlying cell-programming model.
- sopooneo 9y ago
  When you say "shared" do you mean the Excel file is kept on some network drive and that multiple people can access it there?
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    That would be the best case! There's also the horror of emailing them back and forth.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 9y ago
If that’s the case, put me in jail and throw away the key. But I think the opposite: between a spreadsheet and something engineered I will take the (google) spreadsheet every time. I’m allergic to the over-engineered solutions so prevalent.
crystaln 9y ago
Excel spreadsheets are a lot more flexible and easy to use than domain specific tools, particularly for someone already familiar with Excel. I agree this is a good place to look. I'm not sure a new tool will be an improvement as it will always have limitations and a learning curve Excel doesn't have.
kristianc 9y ago
> Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. Think of all the would-be SaaS businesses that have been disrupted by Airtable.
hjalmarg 9y ago
> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. True, but you also have to make sure that you can improve on the spreadsheet way enough to be worth potential customers' switching cost and money. I actually wrote a post about exactly this only a couple of weeks back: "Your biggest competitor is a spreadsheet" - https://medium.com/@hjalli/your-biggest-competitor-is-a-spreadsheet-fea2f0968ca3 https://medium.com/@hjalli/your-biggest-competitor-is-a-spre...
ouid 9y ago
I run all my business logic on a computer that I built in minecraft.
sidcool 9y ago
A hundred times this. Many times the apps which we are building tend to be a simplified version of the spreadsheet. Business points is spreadsheet that is online, which is controlled by authentication and authorisation and has some customizations. We sometimes even propose to build a native Excel based VBA app. The users can always use something like Dropbox sync or box sync on Google Drive sync to share their work with others.
WhiteMonkey 9y ago
The most extreme example of this I've seen is someone who constructed an entire town map in Excel. It was literally incredible. And I'm not talking about a modern American city that's on a grid system, I'm talking about a 700 year old Cornish seaside town, with windy roads and odd shaped ancient buildings. The amount of joined cells alone would have put off weaker men. I hate to think how many hours it took.

fiatjaf 9y ago

90% of the people who invent a CRM on a spreadsheet are better off using that flexible spreadsheet they know very well and can change, add or remove features, store anywhere they want etc. than using a stupid CRM software with 3 features, designed around its creator limited imagination only.

ENGNR 9y ago
Microsoft Access used to be the real test. By the time they've added a UI and started to get frustrated with one user at a time it's time for a CRUD app and a database
lev99 9y ago
The person that invents the CRM spreadsheet is better off. However, that spreadsheet is usually harder to share with the rest of the company. If the spreadsheet has more than 1 user than it might be worth a SaaS.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Just use a google sheet and you’re good for a long time.
  - lev99 9y ago
    It depends. Sheets with multiple users is a bad smell to me.
reificator 9y ago
Yeah. Until they leave for another job and literally no one else in the company can understand the ad-hoc process unintentionally developed over five years of "let's just add this here". Which is not to say that whatever replaces it is guaranteed to be better, but it will at least have a good start by using the right tools for the job.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wil421 9y ago
How is a spreadsheet scalable for a large organization? The team or person might be better off but CRMs and other tools help the organization standardize their processes. What happens when this person leaves? What if business starts booming and you need to scale up? Are you really better off sharing a spreadsheet between a 100 or more people?
- Endy 9y ago
  > How is a spreadsheet scalable for a large organization? Just gonna focus on this part here. The last offices I worked in (and the last places I even dealt with tech stuff beyond teaching it to primary-schoolers), "Track Changes" was simply a godsend. One person "owned" the spreadsheet and could allow use or not; and we had it hosted on OneDrive - of course we all had the OneDrive client on our work PCs and it could tie into Excel natively, so we were all using the same document. If the entirety of a large org needs the same spreadsheet, you're probably looking at a scenario where they really need multiple sheets, but haven't figured out how to do references to other files and sheets yet. But using Track Changes and having one person designated as Owner so that that one individual makes a decision to approve/disapprove all potential changes makes it much easier to let multiple people work together. > What happens when this person leaves? That's a management / succession-planning issue. Ad-hoc solutions shouldn't be kept secret, and allowing employees to just go off and do as they please in that regard is a major issue. If all work-related documents are required to be stored in the company cloud, and you storing a new doc alerts your manager, etc., you'll be able to deal with this much easier. One place I worked for a few weeks on a project did a reset on employee's terminals every Friday at around 7PM, and anyone who claimed they lost data or progress from that on Monday was in trouble, because they didn't save company-related data to the document & data server (which obviously did not get reset) - meaning they'd done something against company policy that they'd been told about the day they were hired.
realusername 9y ago
The issue for the spreadsheet is always around data-integrity, people start typing random things in their Excel and then it's a mess to try to make sense of the data. I would not mind Excel much if it was strongly typed instead.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  But being strongly typed would remove a lot of the usability that makes Excel the most widely used programming language among non programmers.
  - beefield 9y ago
    I think there would be space for a middle ground solution where you could define a sheet "type" to something like "datatable" that would enforce data types on columns, only allow data entered a row at a time and if calculated columns were there, would enforce same formula in each row.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  Isn't that what Microsoft Access was?
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Perhaps there's something to try in that space.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

Perhaps google trends might be useful (is there some API?) for example "how do i sort a list of customers in excel?" How do i track shipping containers in excel?

expertentipp 9y ago

I encountered situations in corporate environment where a couple of questions with an answer selected from predefined list (radiobuttons/dropdown) were made in Excel... of course completely broken without the latest office on windows and outside of the intranet...

IAmEveryone 9y ago

I was actually toying with the idea of replacing our custom-made, rather limited shop system with something entirely based on Google Sheets. We have rather low requirements, which is why I'm resisting existing shop systems. They all seem like overkill to me. But from time to time, someone wants a some statistics, or needs to send emails to "everyone who bought in the last four weeks". These are trivial for me to compile in SQL, but a spreadsheet would allow others to quickly work with the data. Unfortunately, the Sheets API at around one second per request was too slow for my tastes when I last checked it out.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
You could always schedule regular exports of your data to sheets if you just want it to be easier for others to answer simple questions.
tlarkworthy 9y ago
I had a super slow sheet script but I found it had a batch-all-my-changes type of workaround in the API which brought it back into reasonable territory.

beejiu 9y ago

You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. If a spreadsheet works, great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In a similar vein, there are plenty of small software teams that use nothing more than a whiteboard for project management. Yet there are teams tooled up with Jira/Trello/Slack with much less productivity.

weinzierl 9y ago
> You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. The opposite is also true: You can make a decent living creating, customizing or even just maintaining domain-specific tools, no matter if the customer's business really needs them or not.
walshemj 9y ago
It works until it doesn't work then you are Donald Ducked. I one worked at a place where a key part of the finance system ran on a spreadsheet - turns out this SS had mess up or finances and was one of the reasons the company restructured.
- tomcooks 9y ago
  Donald Ducked as in royally fubared?
nraynaud 9y ago
The problem is external criterions like data recovery, data security, quality control, access control, auditing etc.
- detritus 9y ago
  *twitches I can't believe I'm about to sink so low, but... criteria! Criterions are what one adds to soup ;)
  - gregknicholson 9y ago

Analemma_ 9y ago

> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. I understand where you're coming from, but this is just not good advice. Somebody (I can't remember if it was pg, Joel Spolsky, or someone else) once wrote an entire essay basically saying "DON'T make a startup that's just pivot tables. I have seen so many SaaS startups fail because they didn't realize they were just selling pivot tables at a much higher price than Microsoft wants for Excel." Also take a look at this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450802 where a whole bunch of people express bafflement of and loathing for people who unnecessarily replace Excel with half-baked software. It seems like a good idea; it's usually not.

nhebb 9y ago
That was Joel in his "You Suck at Excel" video.
jackweirdy 9y ago
It may also have been in a blog post, but Joel Spolsky makes that remark in his presentation "You Suck at Excel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
weinzierl 9y ago
> It seems like a good idea; it's usually not. Not for a startup, no, but in my experience it works well as a lifestyle business. Companies pay well for this kind of work and it seems the number of spreadsheets they want to have replaced provide enough work for the next few decades to come. Better the replacement isn't half-baked though...

mud_dauber 9y ago

Love this...

dpandya 9y ago

> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. Strongly disagree with this based on personal experience in "traditional" spaces that rely heavily on spreadsheets. There's a reason most of the financial industry uses Excel spreadsheets and it isn't because they can't afford to pay for specialized software. Excel spreadsheets are incredibly versatile. Your data format can change a little bit over time and you'll still be fine. With a custom software solution, you're kind of stuck within the confines of what the developers/product managers gleaned from your working process.

saidajigumi 9y ago
I'll strongly disagree in turn. I personally know some successful founders whose business, in one important facet, could be summed as "get rid of those painful Excel spreadsheets". It's not the use or not of Excel. As with most things, and as TFA discusses, it's about the pain factor. Spreadsheets are, far and away, the greatest success in end-user programming to date. But like all software tools, their usage can grow into painful places. Do the users have massive, error-prone and/or time-consuming workflows built around those spreadsheets? Is it very hard to bring new staff up to speed, or to keep existing staff compliant with process, or to meet day-to-day business goals with those spreadsheets? Is there no solution between "painful spreadsheet" and "$X,000,000 contract w/ bigcorp" to solve those problems? If 'yes' is cropping up in answer to those questions, then lifting the logic from ad-hoc process around spreadsheets into software may be a good idea and/or a good business.
Godel_unicode 9y ago
The basic counter argument to this is software engineering tools. If you have a more than trivial SS you end up needing tests, version control with branches, merge, and rebase, and an automated process for applying both.
glup 9y ago
I worked at a mid-size startup where all of the customer-facing people were ex-finance---I was consistently amazed by the stuff they did in Excel using just pivot tables, rudimentary graphing, and (VBA? I don't think you could use Python at the time) scripts to do data cleaning, ad-hoc CRM, even rudimentary procedural generation of web content. 90% were one-offs, so it was totally appropriate to not throw developers at the problems (recurring things eventually got built out as microservices). The main downside was that the functions and transformations weren't sharable across documents, and often there ended up being several mildly tweaked versions of the same functions across a bunch of documents. But I think I learned something about human tool use: when motivated, people will find a way to use the general purpose tools they know to improve individual efficiency.

Angostura 9y ago

Where I work, I big Word document with a table in it, is the duct tape. Using Excel would be the right way.

antoineMoPa 9y ago

When did spreadsheets, a tool that is generic and versatile, become worse than a n$/month SAAS with fancy bootstrap inputs?

beagle3 9y ago
When they became effectively impossible to audit. That is, at their inception. I've once worked with a trader whose magic sauce was encoded a spreadsheet he had been developing and carrying around for 10 years. It had tens of thousands of formulas and references cross ~50 sheets. He suspected he had introduced an error somewhere, but gave up after a couple of months of trying to, you know, verify the whole thing.
- antoineMoPa 9y ago
  Yeah I'd say that If you have a hundred formulas and more than 10 sheets, it is time to change to another tool. But when someone is this far, they'll have accumulated so much technical dept that they will probably have to hire a programmer because the typical SASS won't solve all of their needs.
bluedino 9y ago
When each user has a different copy, and nobody knows what the most up to date version is. When you have error-prone processes that you do hundreds of times a day based on those spreadsheets, that a bigger application can automate. When ten of those spreadsheets could really be replaced with one.
rdiddly 9y ago
As with most things, its strengths are its weaknesses. Versatility is great, but it's also the enemy of things like standardization, data security and data accessibility. The more people are collaborating, the more those things start to be important.

tyingq 9y ago

If you can get them to use Quickbase/Gsheets/AirTable or similar instead there's a big improvement. Still hacky, but you know what's out there and roughly what it's doing. And better centralized access control and backup.

macintux 9y ago

For the several people reacting negatively to this: the advice isn’t “replace every spreadsheet you find” which would indeed be silly, but “look for spreadsheets as a possible smell that there’s a gap that could be filled”.

crispyambulance 9y ago
Yeah, and to that I would add another nuance. Even if one does find spreadsheets that "ripe" for a more robust tool-- that still isn't enough. One also has to consider the cost of engaging the IT department or others who can do and/or manage development within the organization. That's NOT cheap. Many businesses can barely manage to handle their own shit, let alone successfully do even a small unplanned project to port an excel app running in somebody's cube to something more robust.

stephengillie 9y ago

My most popular project to date started out as copying videogame player names from a website running "SteamQuery", and pasting into Excel.

wglb 9y ago

I actually had a gig based exactly on this. There was a very complex spreadsheet that was used by an actuarial department of an insurance company that they finally decided to automate. There were .net libraries that could access the spreadsheet components and produce external reports, and put values into a database. Oddly, they kept the spreadsheet component as a the input mechanism.

egypturnash 9y ago
Oddly? Why is it odd to not want to change from an input method that you already know like the back of your hand? If everyone who’ll be using this relies on the spreadsheet program for most of their work anyway, being able to keep a lot of the process in there makes sense. Learning a new tool is friction.
- wglb 9y ago
  It was pretty clumsy in its realization. There were like six or seven regions on the one sheet and it was hard to work with. So they kept that part of it.
  - Endy 9y ago
    To be honest, I first learned about using spreadsheets because my mother worked in insurance - not as an actuary but as one of the people under the actuarial department. Lotus 1-2-3 was the norm not only for that office but the industry. As she was retiring, Excel was becoming big (because the standard OS moved from DOS to Windows), and Excel was just starting overtake Lotus. When it's been an SOP for more than 30 years to the point that they can reliably teach the basic use of these sheets in colleges/universities? You're not highly likely to shift it in an established corp.

rdiddly 9y ago

Specifically you need to whittle it down to those uses of Excel where... - one spreadsheet is shared among more than about 5 people (or they each have their own version of it... shudder) - the sheet has more than about 10,000 rows That's the point where Excel truly starts to be not the right answer.

Terr_ 9y ago
There's also the case where the spreadsheet contains a whole bunch of endlessly duplicated and error-prone cell logic that nobody really understands, partly designed to work around limitations in the underlying cell-programming model.
sopooneo 9y ago
When you say "shared" do you mean the Excel file is kept on some network drive and that multiple people can access it there?
- rdiddly 9y ago
  That would be the best case! There's also the horror of emailing them back and forth.

deleted 9y ago

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pbreit 9y ago

If that’s the case, put me in jail and throw away the key. But I think the opposite: between a spreadsheet and something engineered I will take the (google) spreadsheet every time. I’m allergic to the over-engineered solutions so prevalent.

crystaln 9y ago

Excel spreadsheets are a lot more flexible and easy to use than domain specific tools, particularly for someone already familiar with Excel. I agree this is a good place to look. I'm not sure a new tool will be an improvement as it will always have limitations and a learning curve Excel doesn't have.

kristianc 9y ago

> Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. Think of all the would-be SaaS businesses that have been disrupted by Airtable.

hjalmarg 9y ago

> Looking for a SaaS idea? Ask random people in a target industry what kinds of things they do with Excel. True, but you also have to make sure that you can improve on the spreadsheet way enough to be worth potential customers' switching cost and money. I actually wrote a post about exactly this only a couple of weeks back: "Your biggest competitor is a spreadsheet" - https://medium.com/@hjalli/your-biggest-competitor-is-a-spreadsheet-fea2f0968ca3 https://medium.com/@hjalli/your-biggest-competitor-is-a-spre...

ouid 9y ago

I run all my business logic on a computer that I built in minecraft.

sidcool 9y ago

A hundred times this. Many times the apps which we are building tend to be a simplified version of the spreadsheet. Business points is spreadsheet that is online, which is controlled by authentication and authorisation and has some customizations. We sometimes even propose to build a native Excel based VBA app. The users can always use something like Dropbox sync or box sync on Google Drive sync to share their work with others.

WhiteMonkey 9y ago

The most extreme example of this I've seen is someone who constructed an entire town map in Excel. It was literally incredible. And I'm not talking about a modern American city that's on a grid system, I'm talking about a 700 year old Cornish seaside town, with windy roads and odd shaped ancient buildings. The amount of joined cells alone would have put off weaker men. I hate to think how many hours it took.