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Spreadsheets can quickly become horrendously complicated, to the point where writing a computer program with the same functionality, in a conventional language,

Spreadsheets can quickly become horrendously complicated, to the point where writing a computer program with the same functionality, in a conventional language, is a whole lot simpler. Corporations are filled with accountant wannabe programmers who got seduced by this ersatz programming.

baxtr 8y ago
Which is of course true. But in my experience people use excel because it is flexible and accessible. It helps you to store the relevant data and add additional information if necessary. This helps to produce answers to questions that come up e.g. by management, quickly. Of course IT and other dream of SAP monoliths that have all the information. But of course reality is much more messy than these systems and their UI is usually pretty shitty and laggy
intended 8y ago
And corporates also regularly have to buy SaaS moonshine in order to get work done, and then hire consultants to implement it, and deal with other consultants when something goes off. So, Excel is the scratch pad of that world. And it’s good enough for a lot of the initial scratch work, and at even more complex levels it has the ability to provide results. It’s tremendously good for most people, since most people will never be coders. I suspect any intelligent civilization will end up with an excel like program eventually. There’s too much random crap that excel ends up helping many different kinds of people with.
keithnz 8y ago
a friend of mine manages his "food box" businesses logistics with a spreadsheet (google). The thing that it does well is he can adapt it as he changes how he runs his business. It's not super pretty, but I think it works better than coding an alternative that he can't really adapt as easily. With a few manual steps he has it working with shopify, label printers and bar code scanning. He keeps tweaking it as he works out better ways to do things and integrates it with other analytic tools. The only major problem at the moment I can see with it, is it's not easy for anyone else to know how to use it.

baxtr 8y ago

Which is of course true. But in my experience people use excel because it is flexible and accessible. It helps you to store the relevant data and add additional information if necessary. This helps to produce answers to questions that come up e.g. by management, quickly. Of course IT and other dream of SAP monoliths that have all the information. But of course reality is much more messy than these systems and their UI is usually pretty shitty and laggy

intended 8y ago

And corporates also regularly have to buy SaaS moonshine in order to get work done, and then hire consultants to implement it, and deal with other consultants when something goes off. So, Excel is the scratch pad of that world. And it’s good enough for a lot of the initial scratch work, and at even more complex levels it has the ability to provide results. It’s tremendously good for most people, since most people will never be coders. I suspect any intelligent civilization will end up with an excel like program eventually. There’s too much random crap that excel ends up helping many different kinds of people with.

keithnz 8y ago

a friend of mine manages his "food box" businesses logistics with a spreadsheet (google). The thing that it does well is he can adapt it as he changes how he runs his business. It's not super pretty, but I think it works better than coding an alternative that he can't really adapt as easily. With a few manual steps he has it working with shopify, label printers and bar code scanning. He keeps tweaking it as he works out better ways to do things and integrates it with other analytic tools. The only major problem at the moment I can see with it, is it's not easy for anyone else to know how to use it.