8 ms·

Excel never works for math, at any scale. It's a constant trashfire of "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found tha

Excel never works for math, at any scale. It's a constant trashfire of "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats. Excel is nice for visualizing and browsing data you already have, and informally searching and sorting for hypothesis generation.

ksenzee 6y ago
> Excel never works for math, at any scale. That is patently untrue. I've borrowed and lent money based on Excel spreadsheets, more than once. That's small-scale math with real-life consequences, and Excel is an excellent tool for the job.
- mordae 6y ago
  Couch GnuCash Cough
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    You're right, but if you asked me to do something in GnuCash which I never used or do the equivalent in Excel with formulas I'm already familiar with, I'd go with Excel in a pinch. This is why Excel is so well known, because once you get the hang of it, it becomes a great tool for something small. It scales poorly though.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  I'd concur if s/excellent/adequate/.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
My 4th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver I did in an afternoon in Excel the other day, because I didn't want to pirate Matlab to do a homework assignment, begs to differ :). Not to mention, the entire financial industry and many (most?) small businesses. Lots of people use Excel for various types of math, and it works fine, if you know what you're doing. Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable. And that's all without writing a single line of VBA. (We can have a separate discussion about some of the newer Excel features, like automatically suggesting what kind of statistical analyses to perform on your data - I consider this to be a potential future source of serious fuckups, as it allows people to easily transform data using methods, whose assumptions and implications they do not understand.) > "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats That's a feature, though. Excel is interactive, which means you get ample opportunity to do sanity checks on results (both partial and final) as you work on your sheet, as well as immediate feedback on corrections. In "properly written" IT systems, this is rarely the case - you end up discovering a problem further down the chain, and have to figure out which component did something wrong, and why.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  > Not to mention, the entire financial industry That IS the dumpster fire. Trust me, the reason I know is that I used to be that guy who thought Excel was a great tool. I built derivatives spreadsheets, backoffice spreadsheets, trading systems with realtime data, all sorts of crap in Excel. Really, it's Stockholm Syndrome. People who previously had zero computing power at their disposal think they've found the hammer that solves all problems when they're introduced to Excel, because now they can calculate lots of numbers. They just get blinded by the revelation that they can now calculate "anything" and are happy to pay whatever the cost is in terms of future maintenance, ease of understanding, etc. > Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable. This is absolutely true, I'd be able to do much better with Excel now than earlier. The problem is Dunning Krueger. There are too many people who think they can code once they're able to get a bit of Excel going, and they don't know that they can't. Not trying to be condescending, I've been there myself. It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    You bring up some very good points. But to those, I have a question: what is the alternative? Both now (for UK healthcare), and in general? The "people who previously had zero computing power at their disposal" may be wrong in thinking "they've found the hammer that solves all problems" - but there's literally no other hammer available for them. They're not programmers, they won't write their own software (nor would they be allowed to). Any other option involves so much organizational overhead - both initial and ongoing - that it's a non-starter. I agree that people routinely use Excel way beyond their own skills. But I haven't heard of any viable alternative.
    - _AzMoo 6y ago
      The alternative is to pay professionals to do it for them.
    - lordnacho 6y ago
gerdesj 6y ago
I wrote a finite capacity planner for a pie factory in Excel v6. It made my Pentium 60 run a bit warm for a while. It took about 18 months - I was the only IT bod in the place. I also learned basic networking and installed a pair of hubs (yes hubs) with a 10BASE2 "backbone" and 10BASET to the desktop. I learned the new Novell 4 stuff, NDS etc and wrote login scripts etc. When I started, Planning were using Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS and some amazing feats of keyboard jockeying. When I finished with them, they cranked the machine and then used their experience to tweak the plan a bit. Run it past the Production meetings, feedback and twiddle a bit and send it out to the Team Leaders, Quality and the rest. If things started to look different, then run the plan again etc. I borrowed my Dad's logistic textbooks to learn about forecasting (v). Getting from infinite capacity planner to the finite version took quite a while! I don't think you can fault the tool. VBA in a spreadsheet gives you a lot of power but it needs discipline to wield correctly. I used to have a row at the bottom of all my tables with the word "End" in tiny text in each column, always formatted white on red. All my routines that ran down the table to look up and do something would always look for that signal that the end had been found. Nearly all formulae were entered by VBA. I had auditing routines that would test the various sheets for errors - I suppose I "discovered" unit tests. One of them looked for a row of text with specific formatting ... Another obvious check is having row and column sums cross checking each other. I (re)discovered loads of little things like that. With care a spreadsheet can be quite handy for all sorts of tasks but please don't equate the ill advised monstrosities you (and I) might have come across in the past with a fault in the tool itself. Anyway, there is a lot more to this story than that and back then I had a IBM System/36 running the show as well to worry about. Twinax is a right old laugh to deal with. I remember going to Eng and asking to borrow a spanner and a soldering iron - "but you're Planning, what do you need those for". Sorry, started waffling 8) (v) How to forecast demand from the multiples in the UK for pasties, sausage rolls etc, back in the day. There are two cycles one is weekly and the other is roughly annual, with peaks and sometimes spikes at Easter and Christmas and some upticks at bank holidays. The weekly one literally looks like a sine wave, the annual one is a bit more involved. As a first go, take the last three orders by day of week for a product and calculate an exponentially smoothed forecast for next week. For example take the last three Mondays to get next Mondays's forecast. Bear in mind that you need to prep, make, bake, chill and wrap the product and ship to depot with about seven to 11 days shelf life and it takes something like one to three days to do that. You are always making to forecast, which is quite tricky. This was about 25 years ago but Asda, Nisa, Lidl etc used to take our forecast and fax/EDI it back as an order without changes.
arsenide 6y ago
It works for math at the scale I use it. Excel is great in my industry (slot machine game/math design). It is fantastic for doing game calculations and there are reasonable ways to do error handling/checking for correctness. I could say the same about programming a web app without writing tests/spending some time on system architecture. It looks fine until it doesn’t work. In both instances of development (I argue constructing an Excel workbook in my line of work is very similar to programming) there are ways to mitigate risks by doing things similar to “writing tests”.

ksenzee 6y ago

> Excel never works for math, at any scale. That is patently untrue. I've borrowed and lent money based on Excel spreadsheets, more than once. That's small-scale math with real-life consequences, and Excel is an excellent tool for the job.

mordae 6y ago
Couch GnuCash Cough
- m-p-3 6y ago
  You're right, but if you asked me to do something in GnuCash which I never used or do the equivalent in Excel with formulas I'm already familiar with, I'd go with Excel in a pinch. This is why Excel is so well known, because once you get the hang of it, it becomes a great tool for something small. It scales poorly though.
inopinatus 6y ago
I'd concur if s/excellent/adequate/.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

My 4th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver I did in an afternoon in Excel the other day, because I didn't want to pirate Matlab to do a homework assignment, begs to differ :). Not to mention, the entire financial industry and many (most?) small businesses. Lots of people use Excel for various types of math, and it works fine, if you know what you're doing. Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable. And that's all without writing a single line of VBA. (We can have a separate discussion about some of the newer Excel features, like automatically suggesting what kind of statistical analyses to perform on your data - I consider this to be a potential future source of serious fuckups, as it allows people to easily transform data using methods, whose assumptions and implications they do not understand.) > "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats That's a feature, though. Excel is interactive, which means you get ample opportunity to do sanity checks on results (both partial and final) as you work on your sheet, as well as immediate feedback on corrections. In "properly written" IT systems, this is rarely the case - you end up discovering a problem further down the chain, and have to figure out which component did something wrong, and why.

lordnacho 6y ago
> Not to mention, the entire financial industry That IS the dumpster fire. Trust me, the reason I know is that I used to be that guy who thought Excel was a great tool. I built derivatives spreadsheets, backoffice spreadsheets, trading systems with realtime data, all sorts of crap in Excel. Really, it's Stockholm Syndrome. People who previously had zero computing power at their disposal think they've found the hammer that solves all problems when they're introduced to Excel, because now they can calculate lots of numbers. They just get blinded by the revelation that they can now calculate "anything" and are happy to pay whatever the cost is in terms of future maintenance, ease of understanding, etc. > Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable. This is absolutely true, I'd be able to do much better with Excel now than earlier. The problem is Dunning Krueger. There are too many people who think they can code once they're able to get a bit of Excel going, and they don't know that they can't. Not trying to be condescending, I've been there myself. It's just that you get a lot of "coding is a thing I have to do in order to get to some target", and so people think that once they've finally bashed out their spreadsheet, they've figured it all out.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  You bring up some very good points. But to those, I have a question: what is the alternative? Both now (for UK healthcare), and in general? The "people who previously had zero computing power at their disposal" may be wrong in thinking "they've found the hammer that solves all problems" - but there's literally no other hammer available for them. They're not programmers, they won't write their own software (nor would they be allowed to). Any other option involves so much organizational overhead - both initial and ongoing - that it's a non-starter. I agree that people routinely use Excel way beyond their own skills. But I haven't heard of any viable alternative.
  - _AzMoo 6y ago
    The alternative is to pay professionals to do it for them.
  - lordnacho 6y ago

gerdesj 6y ago

I wrote a finite capacity planner for a pie factory in Excel v6. It made my Pentium 60 run a bit warm for a while. It took about 18 months - I was the only IT bod in the place. I also learned basic networking and installed a pair of hubs (yes hubs) with a 10BASE2 "backbone" and 10BASET to the desktop. I learned the new Novell 4 stuff, NDS etc and wrote login scripts etc. When I started, Planning were using Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS and some amazing feats of keyboard jockeying. When I finished with them, they cranked the machine and then used their experience to tweak the plan a bit. Run it past the Production meetings, feedback and twiddle a bit and send it out to the Team Leaders, Quality and the rest. If things started to look different, then run the plan again etc. I borrowed my Dad's logistic textbooks to learn about forecasting (v). Getting from infinite capacity planner to the finite version took quite a while! I don't think you can fault the tool. VBA in a spreadsheet gives you a lot of power but it needs discipline to wield correctly. I used to have a row at the bottom of all my tables with the word "End" in tiny text in each column, always formatted white on red. All my routines that ran down the table to look up and do something would always look for that signal that the end had been found. Nearly all formulae were entered by VBA. I had auditing routines that would test the various sheets for errors - I suppose I "discovered" unit tests. One of them looked for a row of text with specific formatting ... Another obvious check is having row and column sums cross checking each other. I (re)discovered loads of little things like that. With care a spreadsheet can be quite handy for all sorts of tasks but please don't equate the ill advised monstrosities you (and I) might have come across in the past with a fault in the tool itself. Anyway, there is a lot more to this story than that and back then I had a IBM System/36 running the show as well to worry about. Twinax is a right old laugh to deal with. I remember going to Eng and asking to borrow a spanner and a soldering iron - "but you're Planning, what do you need those for". Sorry, started waffling 8) (v) How to forecast demand from the multiples in the UK for pasties, sausage rolls etc, back in the day. There are two cycles one is weekly and the other is roughly annual, with peaks and sometimes spikes at Easter and Christmas and some upticks at bank holidays. The weekly one literally looks like a sine wave, the annual one is a bit more involved. As a first go, take the last three orders by day of week for a product and calculate an exponentially smoothed forecast for next week. For example take the last three Mondays to get next Mondays's forecast. Bear in mind that you need to prep, make, bake, chill and wrap the product and ship to depot with about seven to 11 days shelf life and it takes something like one to three days to do that. You are always making to forecast, which is quite tricky. This was about 25 years ago but Asda, Nisa, Lidl etc used to take our forecast and fax/EDI it back as an order without changes.

arsenide 6y ago

It works for math at the scale I use it. Excel is great in my industry (slot machine game/math design). It is fantastic for doing game calculations and there are reasonable ways to do error handling/checking for correctness. I could say the same about programming a web app without writing tests/spending some time on system architecture. It looks fine until it doesn’t work. In both instances of development (I argue constructing an Excel workbook in my line of work is very similar to programming) there are ways to mitigate risks by doing things similar to “writing tests”.