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I'm actually having a lot of scenarios where Excel is banned except for some managers, C-level and board type stuff. If you produce, touch or directly act on d

I'm actually having a lot of scenarios where Excel is banned except for some managers, C-level and board type stuff. If you produce, touch or directly act on data, Excel is no longer allowed. On the other levels the people that still use it (because they think they have the skill - which they often don't) can't do meaningful direct-action on those files anyway so that solves part of the problem of acting on bad data or bad data processing. We do allow web-based spreadsheets, that has the benefit of limiting what you can do and drives people to either put a request in with the correct team or take internal courses on how to do it right. Some people hate it, but then again, some people hate Excel. The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. In theory you could do the same with Excel-oriented internal courses, but we didn't want to do Excel because a lot of us think it's stupid (often simply for emotional reasons but the push was based on hard data like process metrics and user input). To add to this: it's probably because I find myself attracted to data-driven organisations where using Excel didn't help the workforce much anyway, and the positions I'm in allow for a certain degree of influence on the tools that we support and how much explicit allow/deny we apply on them.

gamblor956 6y ago
The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic understanding of the tool everyone else uses.
- oneplane 6y ago
  I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel. It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web. It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.

gamblor956 6y ago

The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic understanding of the tool everyone else uses.

oneplane 6y ago
I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel. It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web. It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.