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I don't know who or why is downvoting you. You are advancing a perfectly rational discussion and shame on anyone who just disagrees by downvote. What you descr

I don't know who or why is downvoting you. You are advancing a perfectly rational discussion and shame on anyone who just disagrees by downvote. What you describe is an easy trap to fall into, doubly so in a world of imperfect and insufficient data like finance. You very rarely know the full picture and everything you work with is basically stochastic. Yet this stochastic nature can be easily hidden behind copious numbers that seem to add up. However, I'd like to avoid blaming the tool for this. Just as a hammer cannot be blamed just because it enables plenty of "craftsmen" to cobble together rubbish constructions. Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I feel. There's also a flipside I often encounter by the way: analysis paralysis. Data analysis - whether we talk about sexy data science with python, Julia, etc on huge cloud server clusters, or good old boring pivot tables in excel - means that a lot of stuff can now be analyzed in minute detail. I've seen so many efforts get bogged down in a depth first search of fractal-like problems because one can find new and surprising things no matter how deep they dig. Again I think the issue is not the tools, but the practitioners who still have plenty of learning to do in producing concise results that are easy to digest. I consider this a form of art.

stanrivers 6y ago
100% agree with everything you said. Excel itself is never the problem. It user error, and sometimes even "boss of the user error," that leads to both situations you describe - analysis paralysis and overreliance. I call out the "boss" concept because as some people get away from what leads to the numbers that are ultimately output to aid in the decision making, they can sometimes rely on the numbers too heavily relative to other, less "hard" but more important qualitative factors. It also can become an expectation that "robust analysis" is always conducted, and the time required outweighs the value created. Obviously not always the case, but just a tendency you see in things like investment banking, corporate business development, private equity, venture capital even --- For the record - without excel my job would be nearly impossible, so I love it. I just took the chance (and am getting the downvotes for it) to put a reminder out there for the less hard-data centric fields you should always add critical thinking to what is an impressive tool.
dang 6y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvoting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As they say, it never does any good and makes boring reading. Moreover, users often give corrective upvotes, as they did above, which means that the complaint about downvoting is now factually false, and lingers on like uncollected garbage in a thread. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=... The rest of your comment is just fine.
npunt 6y ago
> Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I feel. As someone who's both worked in education and is a designer for a living, I've seen this argument a thousand times about a thousand things, and while there's sometimes merit in it, it's usually a cop-out. Why not bake some of the education into the product, rather than treat them as separate? You probably can't have finance 101 in there, but excel is an example of a product whose internal documentation is rarely sufficient to answer even basic questions. Most of it is also at the basic level of what some function is, rather than how to solve higher level problems or why you'd choose one approach over the other. This approach isn't unique either, there's lots of education technology exploring the overlap between learning and doing within a single tool. The reason we don't see this more is it involves a different team composition than traditional software teams, which tend to not even consider documentation a central part of the product experience, let alone teaching. I agree with any tool capable of doing complex enough things, there's a discipline and an art to its use. But to say Excel doesn't really have a place to improve here is false, it's just stuck in its ways like lots of mature software is.

stanrivers 6y ago

100% agree with everything you said. Excel itself is never the problem. It user error, and sometimes even "boss of the user error," that leads to both situations you describe - analysis paralysis and overreliance. I call out the "boss" concept because as some people get away from what leads to the numbers that are ultimately output to aid in the decision making, they can sometimes rely on the numbers too heavily relative to other, less "hard" but more important qualitative factors. It also can become an expectation that "robust analysis" is always conducted, and the time required outweighs the value created. Obviously not always the case, but just a tendency you see in things like investment banking, corporate business development, private equity, venture capital even --- For the record - without excel my job would be nearly impossible, so I love it. I just took the chance (and am getting the downvotes for it) to put a reminder out there for the less hard-data centric fields you should always add critical thinking to what is an impressive tool.

dang 6y ago

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvoting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As they say, it never does any good and makes boring reading. Moreover, users often give corrective upvotes, as they did above, which means that the complaint about downvoting is now factually false, and lingers on like uncollected garbage in a thread. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=... The rest of your comment is just fine.

npunt 6y ago

> Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I feel. As someone who's both worked in education and is a designer for a living, I've seen this argument a thousand times about a thousand things, and while there's sometimes merit in it, it's usually a cop-out. Why not bake some of the education into the product, rather than treat them as separate? You probably can't have finance 101 in there, but excel is an example of a product whose internal documentation is rarely sufficient to answer even basic questions. Most of it is also at the basic level of what some function is, rather than how to solve higher level problems or why you'd choose one approach over the other. This approach isn't unique either, there's lots of education technology exploring the overlap between learning and doing within a single tool. The reason we don't see this more is it involves a different team composition than traditional software teams, which tend to not even consider documentation a central part of the product experience, let alone teaching. I agree with any tool capable of doing complex enough things, there's a discipline and an art to its use. But to say Excel doesn't really have a place to improve here is false, it's just stuck in its ways like lots of mature software is.