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There's nothing WRONG with the spreadsheet model, and never has been. It's immensely powerful and useful, and the growth in capability over the life of a produc

There's nothing WRONG with the spreadsheet model, and never has been. It's immensely powerful and useful, and the growth in capability over the life of a product like Excel is remarkable and enviable. Excel is perhaps Microsoft's greatest product. The problem with it -- and there IS a problem -- is really a problem of applicability. Excel, like Lotus before it, is the first place many people encounter the ability to create their own logical conditions. For a huge subset of these people, it's also the LAST such tool they learn. And now they have a hammer, so everything is a nail. I don't just mean finance people who live and die by spreadsheets; I've met engineers who would solve problems in Excel macros that would've been better attacked in perl or Python. The other "problem" is the degree to which a horrifying number of organizations end up depending on very, very complex spreadsheets full of arcane and undocumented formulas and macros, and for which change control is "save-as." But, again, none of this is a problem with the product itself, or with the idea of spreadsheets.

brootstrap 7y ago
Yeah i agree with you. Excel is very powerful to some degree but like all things it can be abused. somewhere in a cube farm i can hear the shouts... "Hey Karen did you get the latest budget sheet?" "Is it budget_final_v2_2019.xlsx?" "Damnit Karen that is from last week dear god dont tell me you sent that to corporate!! We are on budget_final_FINAL_v4.xlsx"
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  We see this A LOT in our implementations. We sell & implement a project management financial metrics tool (supporting earned value analyss; google if curious). A key input is always the actual costs of work done, which has to come from the financial system of record. A horrifying amount of the time, the actual path is through goofy undocumented Excel sheets, because nobody knows how to extract it natively from $FinSys.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tvanantwerp 7y ago
  I've been showing a team of economists working on some economic modeling how to use git and R. They were amazed that they could keep working on a file without creating backup copies, or worrying about team mates overwriting their work. It's a work in progress, but they are eager to learn and understand the value there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Shakahs 7y ago
I think there is a tipping point in complexity where Excel needs to be replaced by something else. In the IT world I've seen businesses that have essentially created bespoke ERP applications for themselves by evolving a web of interlinked Excel files over years. A food distributor I worked for was handling their upstream vendors, warehouse inventories, truck inventories, customer list, order history, deliveries, invoicing, and more this way. These businesses suffer because the "Excel ERP" is constantly breaking or losing data, and no one knows how it really works anymore. The food distributor eventually migrated to an actual ERP made for their industry, and the amount of effort and stress saved at all levels of the company was massive.

brootstrap 7y ago

Yeah i agree with you. Excel is very powerful to some degree but like all things it can be abused. somewhere in a cube farm i can hear the shouts... "Hey Karen did you get the latest budget sheet?" "Is it budget_final_v2_2019.xlsx?" "Damnit Karen that is from last week dear god dont tell me you sent that to corporate!! We are on budget_final_FINAL_v4.xlsx"

ubermonkey 7y ago
We see this A LOT in our implementations. We sell & implement a project management financial metrics tool (supporting earned value analyss; google if curious). A key input is always the actual costs of work done, which has to come from the financial system of record. A horrifying amount of the time, the actual path is through goofy undocumented Excel sheets, because nobody knows how to extract it natively from $FinSys.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I've been showing a team of economists working on some economic modeling how to use git and R. They were amazed that they could keep working on a file without creating backup copies, or worrying about team mates overwriting their work. It's a work in progress, but they are eager to learn and understand the value there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Shakahs 7y ago

I think there is a tipping point in complexity where Excel needs to be replaced by something else. In the IT world I've seen businesses that have essentially created bespoke ERP applications for themselves by evolving a web of interlinked Excel files over years. A food distributor I worked for was handling their upstream vendors, warehouse inventories, truck inventories, customer list, order history, deliveries, invoicing, and more this way. These businesses suffer because the "Excel ERP" is constantly breaking or losing data, and no one knows how it really works anymore. The food distributor eventually migrated to an actual ERP made for their industry, and the amount of effort and stress saved at all levels of the company was massive.