5 ms·

Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release. On top

by gxs 6y ago

Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release. On top of that, there is STILL room for human error as a user is still the one actually inputting data and designing the experiment/data flow. I'm going to get mauled on this forum given the audience, but parent comment reeks of the technical elitism on this forum and the tendency to immediately condemn anyone who is using excel. Excel works great - I've personally built some very complicated models that work just fine. Goes through the same process of QA and line-by-line checking of requirements. Not sure what the big deal is - mistakes happen in excel or otherwise.

xupybd 6y ago
Yep Excel is a solid choice for some systems. Business people know it and it's a hard sell to tell them you want more time / money to use something they see giving them less.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
> Goes through the same process of QA and line-by-line checking of requirements. That's simply not possible unless you have a whole system around excel running a year harness. You can maybe do it if you are super dedicated with locked cells and formal double-blind QA passes which maybe exist somewhere but not in the vast majority of operations.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > formal double-blind QA passes I don’t know what you think I have in my unit tests, but it’s almost certainly not whatever you mentioned. Using excel as an alternative to CSV is fine. It’s not like anyone was doing anhthing complicated here. Just storing data.
  - konjin 6y ago
    >Using excel as an alternative to CSV is fine. Clippy the Paperclip Hi, it looks like this alphanumeric constant is the date format used by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Arstotzka for the year 127 BC. I have changed the encoding for the file to Arstotzka standard and overwritten the original.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      Clippy doesn’t have to worry about COVID cases because Arstotzka probably executes them all
rbanffy 6y ago
> Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release. Doing code reviews in Excel is hard if the developers are pathologically disciplined. It's impossible most of the time. And so is debugging. It's very unlikely any such system would face these limitations and would silently ignore data the same way Excel did.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Excel will silently corrupt data, not just drop. It loves corrupting anything that resembles a date, and there no way to say "stop it" globally.
  - gsich 6y ago
    use templates. or use the data importer correctly. No problem.
- javagram 6y ago
  > It's very unlikely any such system would face these limitations and would silently ignore data the same way Excel did. I’ve seen plenty of production systems that ignore or hide errors. Sometimes they’re still logging them, but it just goes to some log store or file that the team doesn’t check until their customers or support team inform them that it’s broken. Good practice? No. But there are plenty of ways to mess up a non-Excel system and get something that works worse.
  - lmm 6y ago
    I'm sure that a developer who's determined enough can mess up any system. And Excel is by no means the only system with that kind of dangerous default (I remember MySQL 4 had very similar behaviour, as did early versions of PHP). But the industry knows this is far from best practice.
konjin 6y ago
The same way that engineers saying you shouldn't use dung to build houses are guilty of architectural elitism. Excel is the wrong tool because it mixes presentation and data, to the point that geneticists had to change the names of genes so their spreadsheets would stop turning them silently into dates and then destructively changing the original data[0]. >Excel works great - I've personally built some very complicated models that work just fine. I've personally cleaned up after people like you, which cost the business millions of dollars because they didn't realize how unqualified they were for doing their jobs. >Goes through the same process of QA and line-by-line checking of requirements. Somewhat difficult as excel is not line based. "Oh yes, these constants are on a different sheet, if you just click here, here, here and here you can see where we get the original data, we multiply it by 1.0 to make sure it's not a date over there and then we feed it back ..." if excel was sanely serializable you could easily version control it and see meaningful diffs between check ins. Double points if you could run tests on sheets and run them in batch mode easily (I said easily). [0] https://interestingengineering.com/genes-renamed-to-stop-microsoft-excel-from-mistaking-them-for-dates https://interestingengineering.com/genes-renamed-to-stop-mic...
- syshum 6y ago
  >>>I've personally cleaned up after people like you, Yep... The critical question that always gets blank stares is "How is this data and calculations validated" There is never an answer to that question from the ExcelMaster, it is always a variation of "it looks correct to me" Wonderful....
  - gxs 6y ago
    Except you can do it if you know what you're doing. No one is saying to manage millions of records etc. But you can get more mileage out of excel than people think - and people who half understand it are the worse because they know enough to know that it doesn't work. Custom solutions are great - but aren't always the answer and with proper process Excel will work just fine in many use cases.
    - konjin 6y ago
ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
I'm sorry but you seem to not understand what data integrity is if you think Excel is a perfectly acceptable solution here.
- gxs 6y ago
  It's all about the use case, man. Within its constraints excel is great. Depending on the nature of your data and exactly what you are trying to do it can accomplish quite a bit. The line between when to use excel and when to build custom stuff is not as clear as it seems, is all I'm trying to say.

by gxs 6y ago

xupybd 6y ago

Yep Excel is a solid choice for some systems. Business people know it and it's a hard sell to tell them you want more time / money to use something they see giving them less.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

> Goes through the same process of QA and line-by-line checking of requirements. That's simply not possible unless you have a whole system around excel running a year harness. You can maybe do it if you are super dedicated with locked cells and formal double-blind QA passes which maybe exist somewhere but not in the vast majority of operations.

Aeolun 6y ago
> formal double-blind QA passes I don’t know what you think I have in my unit tests, but it’s almost certainly not whatever you mentioned. Using excel as an alternative to CSV is fine. It’s not like anyone was doing anhthing complicated here. Just storing data.
- konjin 6y ago
  >Using excel as an alternative to CSV is fine. Clippy the Paperclip Hi, it looks like this alphanumeric constant is the date format used by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Arstotzka for the year 127 BC. I have changed the encoding for the file to Arstotzka standard and overwritten the original.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Clippy doesn’t have to worry about COVID cases because Arstotzka probably executes them all

rbanffy 6y ago

> Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release. Doing code reviews in Excel is hard if the developers are pathologically disciplined. It's impossible most of the time. And so is debugging. It's very unlikely any such system would face these limitations and would silently ignore data the same way Excel did.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Excel will silently corrupt data, not just drop. It loves corrupting anything that resembles a date, and there no way to say "stop it" globally.
- gsich 6y ago
  use templates. or use the data importer correctly. No problem.
javagram 6y ago
> It's very unlikely any such system would face these limitations and would silently ignore data the same way Excel did. I’ve seen plenty of production systems that ignore or hide errors. Sometimes they’re still logging them, but it just goes to some log store or file that the team doesn’t check until their customers or support team inform them that it’s broken. Good practice? No. But there are plenty of ways to mess up a non-Excel system and get something that works worse.
- lmm 6y ago
  I'm sure that a developer who's determined enough can mess up any system. And Excel is by no means the only system with that kind of dangerous default (I remember MySQL 4 had very similar behaviour, as did early versions of PHP). But the industry knows this is far from best practice.

konjin 6y ago

The same way that engineers saying you shouldn't use dung to build houses are guilty of architectural elitism. Excel is the wrong tool because it mixes presentation and data, to the point that geneticists had to change the names of genes so their spreadsheets would stop turning them silently into dates and then destructively changing the original data[0]. >Excel works great - I've personally built some very complicated models that work just fine. I've personally cleaned up after people like you, which cost the business millions of dollars because they didn't realize how unqualified they were for doing their jobs. >Goes through the same process of QA and line-by-line checking of requirements. Somewhat difficult as excel is not line based. "Oh yes, these constants are on a different sheet, if you just click here, here, here and here you can see where we get the original data, we multiply it by 1.0 to make sure it's not a date over there and then we feed it back ..." if excel was sanely serializable you could easily version control it and see meaningful diffs between check ins. Double points if you could run tests on sheets and run them in batch mode easily (I said easily). [0] https://interestingengineering.com/genes-renamed-to-stop-microsoft-excel-from-mistaking-them-for-dates https://interestingengineering.com/genes-renamed-to-stop-mic...

syshum 6y ago
>>>I've personally cleaned up after people like you, Yep... The critical question that always gets blank stares is "How is this data and calculations validated" There is never an answer to that question from the ExcelMaster, it is always a variation of "it looks correct to me" Wonderful....
- gxs 6y ago
  Except you can do it if you know what you're doing. No one is saying to manage millions of records etc. But you can get more mileage out of excel than people think - and people who half understand it are the worse because they know enough to know that it doesn't work. Custom solutions are great - but aren't always the answer and with proper process Excel will work just fine in many use cases.
  - konjin 6y ago

ccktlmazeltov 6y ago

I'm sorry but you seem to not understand what data integrity is if you think Excel is a perfectly acceptable solution here.

gxs 6y ago
It's all about the use case, man. Within its constraints excel is great. Depending on the nature of your data and exactly what you are trying to do it can accomplish quite a bit. The line between when to use excel and when to build custom stuff is not as clear as it seems, is all I'm trying to say.