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And even the one-off reports represent the ability to do coding in tiny increments, precisely tuned to the demand. You can find some report from months ago and
by ben509 7y ago
And even the one-off reports represent the ability to do coding in tiny increments, precisely tuned to the demand. You can find some report from months ago and just open it up and add to it.
And as you're adding features, you instantly see the results; even as you type if you use the formula builder.
If you're working on any kind of software tooling, watching how people work with Excel is incredibly insightful.
- sethhochberg 7y agoAnybody being able to quickly make a significant change has its ups and downs, though... On more than one occasion I've caught word of some fancy spreadsheet a different team in a company has been using to draw insights for months, only to have nontrivial critiques of the source data or interpretation of the data that caused big changes in the results - stuff we would have ideally caught in a dev team's code review or QA workflow, but those processes are entirely bypassed when someone on the marketing team makes a spreadhsheet on their computer and dumps audience data from an advertising platform to seed it. Spreadsheets are nontechnical users' version of "move fast and break things". Often times that can be useful, even essential, but there are many more cases where the primary utility of working that way is also the major flaw. Its faster than traditional report development because it skips any kind of review or QA.