6 ms·

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, t

by 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
    > Criterions are what one adds to soup ;) You're thinking of crouta.
  - theonething 9y ago
    Let me introduce you to a cool website: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/criterion http://www.dictionary.com/browse/criterion
    - detritus 9y ago
      That something incorrectly oft-repeated can take on a veracity all its own is a wonderful aspect of the English language, but it doesn't make things any less twitch-inducing and, bluntly, incorrect. Besides, I wanted to make a somewhat self-deprecating comment, rather than - as you have here - regurgitate some half-arsed passive aggressive form.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
nulagrithom 9y ago
I have to argue against this, because spreadsheets are a real pet peeve of mine. It can be hard sometimes to see _why_ a spreadsheet is broken. Spreadsheets simply don't scale (and I don't mean lolwebscale or whatever.) If two business processes interact through a spreadsheet, or more than two people edit, you're going to immediately run up against the rough edges. Multiple people editing the same sheet inevitably ends in error. It can take a really gross amount of time to update the data when you're pulling/pushing from two sources. It may seem small on the surface, but even 2 hours a week adds up to nearly 3 weeks of work over a year. Can you replace this spreadsheet in 3 weeks? I've seen this play out many times at large and small scale. The first example that comes to mind is a 10-hour day trip my wife took to go out of town and manually update a whiteboard because somebody messed up the shared spreadsheet. She was very unhappy, and this wasted a precious day during a _very_ busy period. Initially, the whiteboard and spreadsheet worked great, so they didn't "fix" it. It didn't scale to the busy times and really screwed them over. At a much smaller scale, I wrote a quick SQL query to get some business metrics for the CEO. He asked if I could run it for him every week. Since I didn't have a good place to put this query, I just ran it manually and emailed it to him at first. Then he wanted to share it with someone on the opposite coast outside our network, so he asked if I could start putting it in a shared spreadsheet. My initial thought was to bang out a page they could pull up instead, but I figured it wasn't worth it. Then he wanted another metric. And another that required a bit of logic that couldn't be done in SQL. Pretty soon I was spending an hour a week manually running SQL and copying the results in to a spreadsheet. (We're a Google Drive shop. No way to connect Sheets to DB2.) That's simply not worth my time. I should've listened to my first instinct. The initial investment in a spreadsheet isn't large, but the ongoing maintenance can really rack up hours. I think it's very often worth investigating any spreadsheet that users have been maintaining/recreating for more than a quarter.
- TuringTest 9y ago
  > Spreadsheets simply don't scale This means that if your computing problem doesn't need to scale, a spreadsheet may just be the perfect tool. However, I agree with you. The next Facebook might be of whomever builds a spreadsheet that scales.
flavio81 9y ago
>You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. If a spreadsheet works, great. If what you are doing is applying math formulas over small or medium sizes of data, then excel is OK. Otherwise it will suck and will be a waste of man-hours at the Office.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> You don't need It's very easy to criticize something by saying you don't need it. There are very few things in life that you absolutely need. Yet there are things that add convenience, greater efficiency, etc, and people will pay for them.
- btschaegg 9y ago
  Completely agree with you here, but I see it most of the time from another angle: If you're working on a project where you can't just plug in external tooling for certain things, there might be tooling that's rather subpar and slows everybody down. And yet - when you try to convince management that someone should spend a couple of hours bringing them up to snuff the reaction usually is "meh, that already works.", ignoring the manhours you throw away every week because the thing is organized so terribly. You'd think from an expenses standpoint alone it would be pretty easy to decide to "fix" things like this if you do a napkin calculation of how much of a black hole for money the whole situation is...
ng12 9y ago
What scares me is the whole world runs on Excel. Name a data-intensive critical industry: deep-sea oil drilling? Power grid management? International finance? All powered by Excel at critical junctures.
dfox 9y ago
I usually frame this as "there isn't any single problem for which excel is the right tool, but for surprising amount of problems it is usable tool" And I've found out that having excel export of essentially any data in your line of bussines application is indispensable unless you expose some kind of excel-like querying and data manipulation mechanism to users as part of your application.
mirimir 9y ago
One advantage of spreadsheets is that data can remain local. Even air-gapped.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  So can most other things - I'm aware that it's fashionable to have More Cloud, but domain-specific, local toolchains have zero reason to be non-local. "Spreadsheet xor cloud" is a false dilemma.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Well, there's local, as in your DC. And then there's local, as in your laptop.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Still not unique to spreadsheet.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        What do you have in mind?
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        That custom solutions do not inherently require a server - "either it's Excel or it doesn't run on the workstation" is something that's actually easier to disprove today, with containers and whatnot. Custom solutions can be fully local, i.e. no network access required.
        mirimir 9y ago
        OK, fair enough. And indeed, I use MySQL with MySQL Workbench in Ubuntu VMs. But still, Excel on equivalent Windows VMs pivots much faster.
tomxor 9y ago
> Yet there are teams tooled up with Jira/Trello/Slack with much less productivity. I work for a small company, we generally use Jira (which we all hate, some with more of a passion than others... ok mainly me). More recently we sort of accidentally started using google sheets for managing issues on some long running projects: it's easier to get an overview, i can add and remove unnecessary attributes of issues and filter them appropriately and dynamically without having to define a whole new workflow and start over. It takes basically the smallest amount of time possible to log an issue... I can organise them however I want. Issue management is overrated, issues are simple, and having something as flexible as a spreadsheet is a surprisingly good fit for anything not customer facing. Oh also, I don't need to _learn_ how to do all those things... it's a spreadsheet so it's obvious, but Jira - it's so hard to do anything unless you live by it, I don't want to live by an issue manager I want it to get the fuck out of the way so i can do work.
tomrod 9y ago
> If a spreadsheet works, great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A spreadsheet works until it doesn't. Maybe you load in past, say, 150mb of data. Perhaps the last person to touch it linked it to a data or content source they only have access to. Perhaps the person editing it has it checked out from a Sharepoint and forgot to check it back in. Perhaps the person editing it left it open on their computer and forgot about it being hosted on a shared drive. Perhaps the business critical sheet is hosted on someone's desktop. Fundamentally, spreadsheets are cocktail napkins. It's fine to sketch out a basic idea. It's a terribly risky approach to run a business from it.

by beejiu 9y ago

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
  > Criterions are what one adds to soup ;) You're thinking of crouta.
- theonething 9y ago
  Let me introduce you to a cool website: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/criterion http://www.dictionary.com/browse/criterion
  - detritus 9y ago
    That something incorrectly oft-repeated can take on a veracity all its own is a wonderful aspect of the English language, but it doesn't make things any less twitch-inducing and, bluntly, incorrect. Besides, I wanted to make a somewhat self-deprecating comment, rather than - as you have here - regurgitate some half-arsed passive aggressive form.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

nulagrithom 9y ago

I have to argue against this, because spreadsheets are a real pet peeve of mine. It can be hard sometimes to see _why_ a spreadsheet is broken. Spreadsheets simply don't scale (and I don't mean lolwebscale or whatever.) If two business processes interact through a spreadsheet, or more than two people edit, you're going to immediately run up against the rough edges. Multiple people editing the same sheet inevitably ends in error. It can take a really gross amount of time to update the data when you're pulling/pushing from two sources. It may seem small on the surface, but even 2 hours a week adds up to nearly 3 weeks of work over a year. Can you replace this spreadsheet in 3 weeks? I've seen this play out many times at large and small scale. The first example that comes to mind is a 10-hour day trip my wife took to go out of town and manually update a whiteboard because somebody messed up the shared spreadsheet. She was very unhappy, and this wasted a precious day during a _very_ busy period. Initially, the whiteboard and spreadsheet worked great, so they didn't "fix" it. It didn't scale to the busy times and really screwed them over. At a much smaller scale, I wrote a quick SQL query to get some business metrics for the CEO. He asked if I could run it for him every week. Since I didn't have a good place to put this query, I just ran it manually and emailed it to him at first. Then he wanted to share it with someone on the opposite coast outside our network, so he asked if I could start putting it in a shared spreadsheet. My initial thought was to bang out a page they could pull up instead, but I figured it wasn't worth it. Then he wanted another metric. And another that required a bit of logic that couldn't be done in SQL. Pretty soon I was spending an hour a week manually running SQL and copying the results in to a spreadsheet. (We're a Google Drive shop. No way to connect Sheets to DB2.) That's simply not worth my time. I should've listened to my first instinct. The initial investment in a spreadsheet isn't large, but the ongoing maintenance can really rack up hours. I think it's very often worth investigating any spreadsheet that users have been maintaining/recreating for more than a quarter.

TuringTest 9y ago
> Spreadsheets simply don't scale This means that if your computing problem doesn't need to scale, a spreadsheet may just be the perfect tool. However, I agree with you. The next Facebook might be of whomever builds a spreadsheet that scales.

flavio81 9y ago

>You don't need a domain-specific tool for every problem your business has. If a spreadsheet works, great. If what you are doing is applying math formulas over small or medium sizes of data, then excel is OK. Otherwise it will suck and will be a waste of man-hours at the Office.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> You don't need It's very easy to criticize something by saying you don't need it. There are very few things in life that you absolutely need. Yet there are things that add convenience, greater efficiency, etc, and people will pay for them.

btschaegg 9y ago
Completely agree with you here, but I see it most of the time from another angle: If you're working on a project where you can't just plug in external tooling for certain things, there might be tooling that's rather subpar and slows everybody down. And yet - when you try to convince management that someone should spend a couple of hours bringing them up to snuff the reaction usually is "meh, that already works.", ignoring the manhours you throw away every week because the thing is organized so terribly. You'd think from an expenses standpoint alone it would be pretty easy to decide to "fix" things like this if you do a napkin calculation of how much of a black hole for money the whole situation is...

ng12 9y ago

What scares me is the whole world runs on Excel. Name a data-intensive critical industry: deep-sea oil drilling? Power grid management? International finance? All powered by Excel at critical junctures.

dfox 9y ago

I usually frame this as "there isn't any single problem for which excel is the right tool, but for surprising amount of problems it is usable tool" And I've found out that having excel export of essentially any data in your line of bussines application is indispensable unless you expose some kind of excel-like querying and data manipulation mechanism to users as part of your application.

mirimir 9y ago

One advantage of spreadsheets is that data can remain local. Even air-gapped.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
So can most other things - I'm aware that it's fashionable to have More Cloud, but domain-specific, local toolchains have zero reason to be non-local. "Spreadsheet xor cloud" is a false dilemma.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Well, there's local, as in your DC. And then there's local, as in your laptop.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Still not unique to spreadsheet.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      What do you have in mind?
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        That custom solutions do not inherently require a server - "either it's Excel or it doesn't run on the workstation" is something that's actually easier to disprove today, with containers and whatnot. Custom solutions can be fully local, i.e. no network access required.
        mirimir 9y ago
        OK, fair enough. And indeed, I use MySQL with MySQL Workbench in Ubuntu VMs. But still, Excel on equivalent Windows VMs pivots much faster.

tomxor 9y ago

> Yet there are teams tooled up with Jira/Trello/Slack with much less productivity. I work for a small company, we generally use Jira (which we all hate, some with more of a passion than others... ok mainly me). More recently we sort of accidentally started using google sheets for managing issues on some long running projects: it's easier to get an overview, i can add and remove unnecessary attributes of issues and filter them appropriately and dynamically without having to define a whole new workflow and start over. It takes basically the smallest amount of time possible to log an issue... I can organise them however I want. Issue management is overrated, issues are simple, and having something as flexible as a spreadsheet is a surprisingly good fit for anything not customer facing. Oh also, I don't need to _learn_ how to do all those things... it's a spreadsheet so it's obvious, but Jira - it's so hard to do anything unless you live by it, I don't want to live by an issue manager I want it to get the fuck out of the way so i can do work.

tomrod 9y ago

> If a spreadsheet works, great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A spreadsheet works until it doesn't. Maybe you load in past, say, 150mb of data. Perhaps the last person to touch it linked it to a data or content source they only have access to. Perhaps the person editing it has it checked out from a Sharepoint and forgot to check it back in. Perhaps the person editing it left it open on their computer and forgot about it being hosted on a shared drive. Perhaps the business critical sheet is hosted on someone's desktop. Fundamentally, spreadsheets are cocktail napkins. It's fine to sketch out a basic idea. It's a terribly risky approach to run a business from it.