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>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spread

by janee 7y ago

>Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees That's a very astute observation. I've found it crazy hard to try and improve existing spreadsheet workflows for farmers as we dig deeper into the domain. I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something

unlinked_dll 7y ago
I once read on this forum, "your competition is Excel."
toyg 7y ago
> industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers. Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.
- etripe 7y ago
  > the ultimate measure of business is money / resources That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc. Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality. > Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area. A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints. I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.
  - janee 7y ago
    > I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down at a certain volume. e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand
grawprog 7y ago
>I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something About the closest I came to getting a client to separate from their spreadsheet was modifying it with some VBA macros so that instead of manually inputting numbers into about 15 different sheets in the book and then manually copying them into a report, they would enter about 10 numbers on one page, press a button and have a nice shiny report fully generated. The client was extremely pleased with this and had no idea excel could do this.
ProZsolt 7y ago
You can do basically anything in Excel. My favorite video on this topic is from Joel Spolsky. You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

by janee 7y ago

unlinked_dll 7y ago

I once read on this forum, "your competition is Excel."

toyg 7y ago

> industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets That would be all of them. Spreadsheets always end up running a business, because the ultimate measure of business is money / resources, which is inevitably expressed in numbers. Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area.

etripe 7y ago
> the ultimate measure of business is money / resources That's not untrue, but perhaps too reductive a view on business, as it ignores "soft" market factors like being primarily risk-oriented vs revenue-oriented, the company's reputation, leadership vision, employee fitness to perform, technical debt, etc. Yes, they all boil down to more or less revenue, profit and growth, but if you only ever look at the spreadsheets, you'll be divorced from reality. > Dedicated solutions introduce rigidity in handling data in exchange for optimisation in handling business logic. They succeed when benefits in the latter area are worth the loss of freedom in the former area. A major selling point for custom software beyond the simple Excel-like CRUD variants is its adoption of sectoral or company assumptions and goals. Yes, that introduces rigidity, but not all rigidity is bad. Most if not all sectors have standards and regulations to comply with, as well as market constraints. I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business, whereas bad rigidity is due to leaky abstractions or poorly bounded contexts. The latter indicates the product is maladapted to day-to-day business operations.
- janee 7y ago
  > I would suggest good rigidity is the kind that keeps you from making mistakes, forces you to get to know your audience or develop your business Another reason would be scale. The flexibility in spreadsheets usually goes hand in hand with having to deal with inconsistencies and from what we've seen that mechanism is usually a person or persons which does eventually break down at a certain volume. e.g. a farmer getting 20 different purchase orders a week, all in their weird unique format and trying to convert all of it into a single format by hand

grawprog 7y ago

>I think in general industries that are heavy reliant on spreadsheets could possibly benefit from specialized software solutions. Think someone called it the unbundling of spreadsheets or something About the closest I came to getting a client to separate from their spreadsheet was modifying it with some VBA macros so that instead of manually inputting numbers into about 15 different sheets in the book and then manually copying them into a report, they would enter about 10 numbers on one page, press a button and have a nice shiny report fully generated. The client was extremely pleased with this and had no idea excel could do this.

ProZsolt 7y ago

You can do basically anything in Excel. My favorite video on this topic is from Joel Spolsky. You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c