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Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors
- celias 6y agoMatt Parker's "When Spreadsheets Attack" video about EUSpRig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb2zkxHDfUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb2zkxHDfUE
- hermitcrab 6y agoMatt Parker's 'Humble Pi' book is also well worth a read: https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/humble-pi-signed-paperback https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/humble-pi-signed-paperback
- OscarCunningham 6y agoAlso related, his recent video about the UK government's loss of COVID data (featuring a fantastic parody ad for Spreadsheets™): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUp8pkoeMss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUp8pkoeMss
- vlucas 6y agoLove this. Glad to know there is a whole established group of other spreadsheet nerds out there! I made BudgetSheet ( https://budgetsheet.net https://budgetsheet.net ) for myself and others who love to work in their own spreadsheets!
- NoPicklez 6y agoI work at a large firm which has shifted itself from using Excel, to significantly promoting data analytics tools such as Alteryx in place of Excel. One of the MAJOR improvements from using Alteryx is that it is easier to audit and review the process. With Excel you can be down the rabbit hole of data manipulation or formula driven outputs and realise you have made a mistake but cannot find where or how. Or cannot find where you went wrong without recreating the steps followed. The workflow style interface of Alteryx and other data analytics tools allows everyone to see the process from start to finish of how you are getting to your outputs. It can also ingest and handle much larger datasets than default Excel. I honestly believe that we will see a large shift from using Excel to using better suited analytics tools. I cannot think of anything I can do in Excel that I can do in a GUI based data analytics tool. Not to write Excel off completely as will certainly still be using it, but to a lesser extent and not where complex data manipulation is required.
- vikramkr 6y agoThe problem is that everyone has and knows how to use excel. And enough people in finance and consulting see excel skills as a mark of status that there's going to be some resistance to change there. A new tool has to be equally universal, easy to use for basic purposes while having advanced capabilities, etc. There are courses that teach supply chain management with solver and the like - having people shift over from the only software they were trained to use is not trivial. It was easier for geneticists to change gene names than change excel behavior in the end for a reason - excel is powerful and everywhere
- ecpottinger 6y agoNot only have I seen spreadsheet used for function they were never intended for like using it as a text notepad. The main problem since spreadsheets are easy to set up, people create them without asking even the most basic safety functions. Testing the range on inputs or outputs is not done enough, but worse using the wrong functions can give a sheet that looks good but is very wrong.
- NoPicklez 6y agoI'll stop you right there when I say that the firm I work at is a global finance and consulting firm and has globally started shifting to using data analytics tools such as Alteryx over Excel. The barrier to entry into Alteryx is nowhere near as difficult as say python or R for finance teams and consultants. It is also seen as a mark of status to master a data analytics tool which improves a particular process either within the company or at a client.
- 1123581321 6y agoAlteryx appears to be considerably more expensive, though. Shouldn’t it take a tool of comparable cost to replace Excel? Especially in self-serve use. I’m not disputing the quality of the tool, to be clear. It seems like a good change and a totally reasonable line item. Just questioning what it will take to actually replace Excel in a widespread way. https://www.alteryx.com/products/platform-details/pricing https://www.alteryx.com/products/platform-details/pricing
- wortelefant 6y agoThe European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EUSpRig) runs an annual conference [...] — and there’s also a Yahoo Groups mailing list, where members offer tips and tricks, share links to resources and pick apart press coverage of the contact tracing debacle When Yahoo Groups shuts down, no more excel repair for governments?
- orthoxerox 6y agoExcel took a step in the right direction when it introduced tables, which autofill formulas for all its rows (seriously, use them!), but it should've made deviations more obvious in them. Right now it's the usual green corner, which is extremely easy to miss in a large data set. This, and explicit column types would prevent maybe 80% of spreadsheet errors.
- Already__Taken 6y agoYou know, for all of the rebellion over windows telemetry they probably do have the metrics somewhere to find out if your correct.
- cosmie 6y agoTechnically you do have column types already[1], although only available via the data model[2] (another wholly underutilized feature set). Although it only helps to an extent, since it doesn't prevent bad data from being input into a table, and supports so many implicit conversions (listed out in [1]) that undesired behavior is still possible. Plus it enters into a little known area of Excel rather than baked into the customary workflows. That said, it still comes in handy. A typical pattern of mine for worksheets I have to release into the wild (i.e. no telling who will end up (ab)using it and when it'll eventually come back to me in a bastardized form to salvage) is: 1. Create table(s) for raw/user-inputted data 2. Use that table as a source for PowerQuery 3. Leverage PowerQuery for type checking, data normalization validation, and data joining. 4. Output to a new table on the worksheet, referencing this instead of the original table for all formulas. Also optionally putting complex logic into the PowerQuery steps, that way the "output" table is ready for end-use and doesn't require any complex and error-prone formulas or anything. Even without leveraging the data model and DAX functions, this works out super well. More sophisticated users can easily modify the PowerQuery steps, and less sophisticated users are protected from accidental mistakes by either using it as-is or reaching out for help earlier on, before there's a crisis for assistance. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-data-model-in-excel-87e7a54c-87dc-488e-9410-5c75dbcb0f7b https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-data-mod... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/data-types-in-data-models-e2388f62-6122-4e2b-bcad-053e3da9ba90 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/data-types-in-dat...
- moomin 6y agoI used to professionally audit spreadsheets that were used to back up million dollar decisions. I say “back up” because it was fairly clear the decisions were made independently. But they needed to tick a box saying they’d had it audited so they paid us for a two day audit. In that limited time, which included writing the report, you’ll appreciate we rarely had time to audit anything more than the top-level summary sheet. There was always at least one mistake that put the numbers out by 8 digits.
- imperfectcats 6y agoIs your job to help the justify the justification, or to really fix things?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI assume you fix the math errors and then whatever the result is turns out to be the justification for the decision. The result doesn't matter, so you don't need to aim at a particular one.
- moomin 6y agoNeither. You report what you found. You make recommendations. You state which areas you haven't had the time to look at. Under no circumstances do you provide any guarantees that might put you at the wrong end of a multi-million dollar lawsuit. This, incidentally, is every audit ever. I've been audited many times, every audit finds stuff and make recommendations. Then management gets to pick which recommendations they adopt and which they'll derogate. I'm not saying it's a completely useless process, but it doesn't provide the cast-iron guarantees people think it does. Then, of course, there's financial audits, which are meant to provide a cast-iron guarantee the firm is still a viable entity. But nearly every big firm that went bankrupt had passed such an audit in the previous year.
- xivzgrev 6y agoI had no idea this was a thing, but makes total sense!
- conductr 6y ago
- jgilias 6y agoExcel is a great case study. Turns out, if you give people an accessible and widely available Touring complete environment, they will manage to do pretty much anything with it. On another note, it's interesting to observe that the problems spreadsheets have are the same problems that plague poorly designed software everywhere - lack of documentation, lack of testing, lack of input validation, among others.
- hermitcrab 6y agoOne of the big issues with spreadsheets is the lack of visibility. It is very hard to tell what is going on in any non-trivial spreadsheet. That something that visual data flow tools such as Alteryx, Knime and (my own) Easy Data Transform try to address. The other problem is specific to Excel. It just loves to mangle your data! The problem is so bad that geneticists have renamed some genes to stop Excel reinterpreting them as dates.
- askvictor 6y agoNot just Excel; Google Sheets too. Our school system has student codes in the format ABC0001 where ABC is the first three letters of the surname, and the number is sequential. So a student with a surname Martin might get a code MAR0004. Which Sheets, in it's wisdom, decides to interpret as the date March 2004. Go figure.
- sciurus 6y agoDates can be weird just about anywhere. I recently hit a bug where all data was being checked to see if it was a datetime, and python interpreted `st1` as September 1st of the current year. https://github.com/mozilla/frost/pull/330 https://github.com/mozilla/frost/pull/330
- ptx 6y agoNot really Python as such, it seems, but rather some third party library[1] which promises "generic parsing of dates in almost any string format". This is impossible to do correctly (what is 01/02/03?) and usually a bad idea to attempt. [1] https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/ https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/
- crispyporkbites 6y agoExcel is a triumph of software. Never before has there been a REPL so powerful, a programming language so widely used, an environment so simple even mere mortals can produce magic - without it what would we have? The power of software would remain closed behind the Ivory gates of the self-titled engineers with development cycles, sprints and countless hours to make a single formulae change. Fear the excel less world, for without it society is a shadow of its potential!
- smabie 6y agoI don't actually like Excel, and think it could be significantly better, but in general, I agree with you. Excel has allowed users with domain specific knowledge to create real honest to god software cheaply and quickly. The biggest triumph of Excel is that you can incrementally learn new things, slowly turning a basic worksheet into a Turing complete masterpiece. In contrast, I believe that programming languages have a much higher barrier to entry.
- wintorez 6y agoI would like to argue that Excel (i.e. spreadsheets) are a form of programming language; albeit in tabular format. Each cell is a variable, some cells are constants, some cells are computed, cells can be conditional, etc. A programming language must not necessary come in form of written text. We can say that concept of spreadsheet is the programming language, and Excel, Google Sheets, etc. are just implementation of the same concept. The success of spreadsheet is in the fact that its visual and intuitive, similar to what made Visual Basic and Delphi very successful.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tuatoru 6y ago> without it what would we have? In an ideal world, we would have pgsql (the PostgreSQL front-end) and AWK, and people who realize that thinking about the model before you start playing with layouts and copy-pasting formulas is a good idea. Edit: Excel is a Dunning-Kruger syndrome enabler. People think they can do data analysis because they can type "=sum(B1:B4)" into a spreadsheet.
- DavidPeiffer 6y agoExcel suffers from being accessible to "everyone", and having a low barrier of entry. While I'm not an auditor, I've been the go-to Excel person at all my internships and in full time roles. I've reviewed, enhanced, and fixed hundreds for tons of different functions (HR, supply chain, manufacturing production reporting). You can build a respectable system in Excel which has built in error flags that make it obvious to the end user. Here are some of my tips for people who deal with spreadsheets: * Cell styles, much like headings in Word, are really great but nobody uses them. They clue end users about what cells do. If my end users see an orange cell, they know it's an input they can modify. * Lock sheets, even without a password. 90% of the time will prevent people from breaking the spreadsheet in the first case. * Stay up on new functions! =Unique, filter, sort, Switch, textjoin, and {sum|average|min|max}ifs have been added in the last ~18 months and can greatly clean up messy formulas. * Document stuff like code should be documented. The Explanatory Text style is excellent for more in depth explanations but not visually clogging things up. * Use tables. Name the tables. =Average(tbl_Production[Widgets Produced]) is self documenting, and the range expands with the table. Range references are notoriously obtuse. -- The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group has some great information on best practices. http://www.eusprig.org/best-practice.htm http://www.eusprig.org/best-practice.htm Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" is also eye opening for most. https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- razakel 6y ago>Excel suffers from being accessible to "everyone", and having a low barrier of entry. I call this "baby with a nailgun syndrome". You end up with a bloody mess.
- sohkamyung 6y ago> there’s also a Yahoo Groups mailing list, where members offer tips and tricks, share links to resources and pick apart press coverage of the contact tracing debacle. I do hope the group is aware that Yahoo! is closing down Yahoo Groups and have moved their mailing list
- milesvp 6y agoObligatory link to excelint/checkcell threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22431500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22431500 https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11100 https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11100 One of the interesting takeaways from Emery Berger's talk, is that he was able to replicate to 2 decimal places a published spreadsheet transcription error rate of 5.26% of cells have errors. I highly recommend the talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWKxFxyyrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWKxFxyyrQ
- F_J_H 6y agoTo riff on a quote originally about unix: "Excel doesn't stop you from doing stupid things because then it would stop you from doing smart things."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ekanna 6y agoTo address some of these problems, I have created a Excel add-in[1]. It checks errors in formulas, facilitates easy navigation of formulas. One can even create drill down reports from formula. [1] https://excelworld.com https://excelworld.com
- m3nu 6y agoNot surprised. I modeled company finances in my first internship. We would check the numbers for plausibility, but I'm certain most were still wrong. For anything serious, I'd probably choose Python/Pandas/Jupyter these days for better reproducibility.
- SMAAART 6y agoRecently switched jobs. In both my old job and my new job we use spreadsheets for data-driven-decision-making. At my old job I was driving to migrate from classic spreadsheet analysis to Google Data Studio, and I am doing the same at my new job. There's some resistance in old dogs not wanting to learn new tricks, but for most of what we do, GDS is really impressive.
- racecar789 6y agoAbout Excel visual grid performance...I have tried many data table libraries over the years in various languages. Almost all have performance issues when reaching 100-1000+ row range (even with virtualization and other tricks enabled). I would like to know how the Excel team made their grids so fast. Scrolling is so smooth.
- gmueckl 6y agoMS Office was updated to use GPU accelerated rendering and I guess this has something to do with it. I don't know how this works (which API, which portions of the software, which algorithms) as details on that seem to be pretty sparse.
- sjy 6y agoI don’t think so – Excel has felt significantly slower to me ever since they introduced the GPU “accelerated” interface.
- racecar789 6y agoSame here. From around Excel 2007 - 2013... activating the GPU acceleration option slowed Excel way down. I remember turning off the setting many times during those years to get better performance. Fast forward to 2016-today...Microsoft fixed the GPU acceleration bugs.
- nerdponx 6y agoI recently opened a 9000 row sheet in LibreOffice Calc on an x220 and had no performance degradation at all. In fact I was impressed at how responsive the application felt compared to Excel. Might be interesting to try bigger and bigger files until it looks like it's slowing down.
- 867-5309 6y ago>£40,335 >start date they forgot to elaborate on this one
- 867-5309 6y agouncertain for the downvotes, care to share which date you see in those numbers..?
- hashtagmarkup 6y agoAt what point does being a "warrior" turn into being an "enabler"?
- OzCrimson 6y agoExcel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going through a DBA for every little need? - Salesforce? It's hell to configure if you don't have the skill. - Sharepoint? Again. If you're a small business or nonprofit, you've gotta hire or train someone before this is a serious conversation. I would in no way suggest that an enterprise can run on Excel with centralized data and multiple users. And that's where I believe a lot of criticism of Excel is unfair: the comparisons are not apples to apples. And let's be honest. EVERYTHING comes with a level of human error. - Enterprise level databases can get so big that the corrupt data in them can be impossible to cleanse. - Reports made by SQL people are often flawed. Over my 7 years in an international company I discovered report after report that didn't accurately match business rules or they were based on loads of incomplete records, duplicates, inconsistencies, incorrect math, etc. How about fixing the reports? Often the decision was "no." Fixing the reports wasn't something a department head wanted to pay a consultant for. Eventually, I had the DBA stop sending me reports. I started exporting the raw data into Excel and made my own reports. - Brand new reports can be impossible to get if they don't justify the cost of a consultant to create the report. (Ah, but there's Excel.) - Databases get hacked and they crash. So. Where's the tool that's perfect, free and easy to use? It doesn't exist.
- ssdspoimdsjvv 6y agoExcel is the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail. It is very flexible, powerful and beginner-friendly. And while you can solve a lot of problems with it, some of those should be handled by other programs (or other people). The problem is that the average Excel user doesn't have the right knowledge to judge what the best solution is to their problem. And sometimes it only becomes clear after long use that they have created an unwieldy tool which causes many unforeseen problems.
- OzCrimson 6y agoAgain. What's the comparable alternative? This is so frustrating because I've worked in small departments in an international company. Our problems were too small to get consistent, needed help from IT and we weren't important enough to get one of the limited licenses to the fancy reporting system. Ultimately, there's all this bad talk about evil Excel, but we get no help or other resources. And what about all the junk reports that were coming out of the company database that no one wanted to spend the money to fix? THE ONLY VIABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS EXCEL.
- listenallyall 6y agoGive me a break. 2nd sentence of the article: "It had the number 40,335 in a random box, and payroll wasn’t clear why it was there." If you work with Excel with any regularity at all, it's immediately 100% clear that this is a Date issue. I can't emphasize enough how obvious and elementary this "mystery" is.
- smcl 6y agoI don’t use excel - could you explain what date this and why it’s obvious?
- jasode 6y ago>I don’t use excel - could you explain what date this and why it’s obvious? MS Excel internally represents dates as a floating point number from epoch of Jan 1 1900 So "40335" or "40335.0" is +40,335 days from that epoch -- which is June 10 2006. An experienced Excel user often runs into "mysterious 5 digit numbers" from 3xxxx to 4xxxx and will instinctively think it's probably a date that's inadvertently formatted/interpreted as a number. By switching the formatting of that cell to "Date" (Excel right-click "Format cells..." choose Category "Date"), the mystery number becomes a readable mm/dd/yyyy. Same idea as experienced programmers coming across a 10-digit number like "1602930678" in a JSON or XML data file and instinctively assume it's probably a UNIX timestamp rather than a phone number with area code (160).
- Veen 6y agoThe article is written for a general audience that probably doesn’t use Excel regularly. It would be counter-productive to use an example the reader needs paragraphs of explanation to understand.
- listenallyall 6y agoIt's not about the article, it's a criticism of a company so clueless that it was unable to decipher a date without calling upon outside consultants.
- OzCrimson 6y agoOne thing I'm thankful for is my Excel skill. Why do I even have Excel skill? Because of the garbage reports and data that I was pulling out of databases. I spent YEARS exporting data-dumps and cleansing them in Excel to help customers whose lives were turned inside out because of garbage in databases. Not a negative word should be uttered about Excel until you can guarantee that databases and software are pristine and never fail due to human error.
- strangeattractr 6y agoI agree the excel is great for cleansing or processing small/medium sized data sets. It's great for comparing two or more data sets too. The thing that makes it great for these things is visual editing, and the ease of setting up formulas. This also makes it dangerous in business critical processes because it allows too great a surface for mistakes. There's also the issue that they're often set up as an ad hoc analysis only to become a process carried out on a schedule. This gets particularly bad when macros are involved - especially when they're password protected.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PeterStuer 6y agoHaving consulted in large enterprises, the main reason spreadsheets exist: A knowledge worker needs some form of automation support to do the job. Choices are: (a) spend a day drafting a rough spreadsheet, then over the next months tinker with it making it a bit better, more efficient and add more relevant functionalities. (b) put in a formal project request to IT. This will be put into the backlog, and most probably classified as non priority unless there is some lobbying from people with clout to 'get this done'. When accepted, usually months or even years later, it will be analyzed at length by a business analyst that is unfamiliar with the problems that need to be solved, handed over to a programmer (or worse, an external contract) that will implement something that will have 30 assumptions filling the holes in the analysis, be accepted by the analyst and then thrown over to the poor user that will have to figure out if something, anything relevant to the job can be done with it. The user can start asking for corrections or rewrites, but since most of the operation is CYA from start to finish has a high chance of being berated for 'wasting the companies resources' (after all, this project that could have been done in a day with a spreadsheet has now already cost the org 200k or more in the least, a significant amount of that went to the IT dept's internal platform rewrites that they are desperate to do but never get budget for from the business) and with high probability land the user on the 'difficult/nagging' people list of the IT dept. Every few years the enterprise will launch an initiative to 'clean up all our processes', typically when a new key manager moves in with 'friendly' IT contractors that he was palls with at his previous place, and they'll start with an inventory of all the 'shadow IT' (spreadsheets, Access DB solutions, homebrew VB programs, some SaaS stuff ...) in order to purge and consolidate all onto the shiny new ERP/BPM/... platfrom that was sold to the CxO. The new platform a few dozen million dollars later will (if successful) deliver maybe 33% of the required functionality, and the users can either 'let the business fail to show the nobheads that it is an impossible system to run the business on' or, more likely, keep using their spreadsheets and other quick fix solutions to keep the business running despite.
- hermitcrab 6y agoHere speaks the voice of bitter experience. ;0)
- 6y ago
- dagaci 6y agoThey key here is not about swapping tools, or swapping people, because tools and people are both equally fallible. The key is "Code Review" and reasonably proof by testing, not just unit testing which is just nice, but integration testing which is strong. Responsibility is knowing the scale of potential impact, that's when you should 100% insist having some proof with a proper tester.
- eru 6y agoOne of the problems with Excel is that it is just shy of being inauditable. Excel is a great 'programming language' to quickly _write_ business applications. Especially for relative lay-people. But Excel is almost impossible to _read_. And it's very hard to make changes, or track them sensibly.
- variable11 6y agoThis is probably the grossest misuse of the term "warrior" in recent memory. You're a spreadsheet guru, not someone in a war.
- ryeguy_24 6y agoThis has been my profession for the last 15 years in a large consulting firm. We do this work for financial institutions (some other industries too). Despite how this group feels about banks, US banks have set up internal groups that literally review (validate) and test quantitative models, many of which live in Excel. This was driven by SR11-7 and OCC2000-16 both regulatory guidance. The term for this group / department / function is Model Risk Management (or model validation). Most banks now hold an inventory of models that exist in the entire bank (or at least the ones that have been declared) and they run a battery of testing procedures on them annually. It’s pretty exhaustive and sometimes too much but it certainly finds errors both in implementation and in logic. You’d be amazed at the types of errors we’ve found over the years. Formulas referencing blank cells, relative references formulas that were meant to be static when the formula was copy and pasted to other cells. These were in some pretty serious models (e.g. trading models, risk monitoring models). One point on Excel, it’s wildly powerful. We’ve done things in Excel that would impress most of this group. Things like 3D formulas (formulas that go through tabs), array functions (which are very infrequently used but are very powerful). I’d argue that most pieces of code (with the exception of recursion and other advanced things) can be replicated in Excel. Half of the time when validating complex models implemented outside of Excel, we’d use Excel to replicate the logic to benchmark the result. My big question to this group is, does this type of practice exist in non-banks? Do other industries do this?
- dmaevsky 6y agoI used Excel professionally for 20+ years as a quant in major banks. Mostly as a front end to mathematical models in C++. Always been amazed how a 40 years old UX paradigm is still being used virtually unchanged in modern systems. Spreadsheets are truly ubiquitous in the financial industry, and for 20 years I've been struggling with exactly the same issues mentioned in the article and in other comments here. The problem is that neither Excel, nor most alternatives treat a spreadsheet as code that it essentially is. And being code, it needs to - be source control friendly - be testable - have business logic (formulas) decoupled from presentation Only then one can seriously consider using a spreadsheet as part of any production grade system. For the past couple of years I've been working on https://ellx.io https://ellx.io - a platform for visual reactive programming and a new generation spreadsheet/notebook designed to solve exactly this pain point. Here are some examples of what you can do with it: [1] https://ellx.io/dmaevsky/monte-carlo https://ellx.io/dmaevsky/monte-carlo [2] https://ellx.io/matyunya/tensorflowjs-simple-demo https://ellx.io/matyunya/tensorflowjs-simple-demo [3] https://ellx.io/ellx-hub/plot https://ellx.io/ellx-hub/plot
- PlugTunin 6y agoIn my former life I worked in Finance departments of Fortune 500 companies, responsible for process and report automation, and making Excel-based systems less unwieldy -- often by converting them to Access. I have an Accounting & Info Systems degree. I'm well-versed w/ relational databases, SQL, and VBA. In more recent years, to distract myself from wanting to die, I've become proficient with Python and R. Unfortunately, a gap in my resume a few years ago became the reason recruiters started treating me like a leper. What went wrong, besides bad luck? I was good enough at what I did that the perception formed that I'm not a real Finance person. So, instead of being used in roles with longevity, where writing code was an adjunct to domain expertise, I became The Tech Guy: a'hired gun', used exclusively to build tools for the real Finance pros to use in perpetuity. Reading these comments is upsetting because they suggest that in 2020, someone w/ my background should be able to support themselves. To those who understand the power of databases and automation, the inanity of using Excel to do almost everything except wash your dishes is painfully obvious. Trust me: there's a better way. Many technical people -- W/OUT a business background -- are prepared to do whatever is necessary to improve their understanding of The Business Side. Why is it that asking finance types to write code is akin to asking them to perform brain surgery? Perhaps grasping math and accounting principles doesn't imply creativity, or competency w/ language and logic? I've worked with people who can do all of these things. In 20 years, those who can't may struggle to find work. Somehow, in spite of my background, I ended up in the same boat. Sorry to sound bitter, but people with skills who can't find work are sometimes more miserable than those without any skills, who have resigned themselves to a life of earning minimum wage. I miss the good old days, when I could flush money down the toilet for sport.
- giardini 6y agoJocelyn Ireson-Paine (JIP) et al developed software years ago that converts spreadsheets to language and vice versa, so you can write in code and then generate a corresponding spreadsheet. This two-way capability aids, among other things, in debugging spreadsheets. JIP is in euSPRIG (see http://eusprig.org/best-practice.htm http://eusprig.org/best-practice.htm ). Here are some links: http://j-paine.org/eusprig2005.html http://j-paine.org/eusprig2005.html https://www.i-nth.com/tag/jocelyn-paine https://www.i-nth.com/tag/jocelyn-paine http://www.j-paine.org http://www.j-paine.org