11 ms·

Excel bashing is easy but, where's a truly comparable alternative? - Alteryx at $5000/year/user? - A database that requires specialized skill or going throu

Excel 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 ago
Excel 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 ago
  Again. 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.
  - deknos 6y ago
    No. it's not the only alternative. it's the only thing you and many other accept. Python+Jupyter is a real alternative.
    - OzCrimson 6y ago
      You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.
      - deknos 6y ago
        exactly. because he does not see a problem with this because people like you tell him it's the only solution since dawn of excel. But when developers complain they have to learn domain specific items, people say the shall keep up with the times. but suddenly the analysts and the others are exempt from this?
  - ssdspoimdsjvv 6y ago
    Real life doesn't always provide ideal solutions. In your case, using Excel is probably the easiest or even only way to do what's needed. That doesn't mean it's the best, or even a good solution. If it causes organization-wide problems, whoever runs your organization should make sure better processes are instilled. The only thing you can do is make it clear to the person above you and hope things improve.
    - OzCrimson 6y ago
      We're closer in agreement. And I'd never suggest that Excel was the best solution or even a good solution at times. (I hated the tedious error-prone things that I used to do in Excel.) I'm just offering the context from which weird stuff happens. And the answer isn't always as easy as: put it in a database. The context, the processes (or lack of processes), the decision-makers, budgets, timelines, they all play a part in the outcomes.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  "The right solution to their problem" being a developer, at least as far as developers are concerned. Hammers and nails...
  - Moru 6y ago
    Sometimes that database feels more like a jetplane when all I need is a hammer for my nail. Excel (or libreoffice calc) is perfect for a lot of stuff, especially those small things that you won't ever do again.
    - OzCrimson 6y ago
      100%
    - bpiche 6y ago
      Excel is a UI over a database table. With a bunch of other UI driven math/stats functions built in. It really comes down to a difference between UI driven folks and folks that are code literate.
- Pamar 6y ago
  Your position is more reasonably explained than most of the Excel Haters' (I am a card carrying member of the group, btw) but there is an additional problem. Even if/when the "average Excel user" finally sees the Light ... s/he still has to work in an environment where excel files (including .csv) are the lingua franca. It's a bit like working for the German (or French or Japanese etc.) branch of a US large company. Of course the official language is English, and all documents should be written in English and emails should be in English and so on. Even if everybody (down to the Janitor?) speak acceptable English and are perfectly able to talk business in English... everyone will still use German unless they have to communicate with someone like me, whose German fluency is rated in Imaginary Numbers.
lloeki 6y ago
To me it seems Python or Julia notebook stuff like ipython or jupyter could (and did in some circles) displace Excel in almost all cases. The self-sustained inertia to change is real though.
- OzCrimson 6y ago
  Who's going to pay to train a Customer Service Rep, Admin Assistant, Sales Assistant or Warehouse Manager to do Python when there's Excel? Get into the world of the Excel user. Some of us do learn coding. But generally speaking? No. If it happens, it's on our own. And we can agree that spreadsheets have problems, and Excel users typically are not data people. BUT! When we agree on that, it becomes evident that a lot of suggested solutions are non-starters. Not all Excel users are in an enterprise that's throwing money around for training and dedicated software. I'd like to see the Warehouse Manager who goes in Monday morning and says to the company vice-president, "I've been looking into this Python class ... "
  - rjtavares 6y ago
    The problem isn't businesses using Excel, the problem is businesses using Excel for critical processes. The Warehouse Manager or Sales Assistant doesn't need to learn an alternative, but e.g. the Finance people should. PowerBI/Tableau for reporting and R/Python for modelling should be a thing in those worlds (even if Excel continues to be an amazing tool for entry level stuff and some quick number crunching).
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      > PowerBI/Tableau for reporting In my experience these take ages to load data that is near instant on Excel. I can totally see how people prefer excel.
      - rjtavares 6y ago
        It may take longer to load, but it allows you to automate the data processing. That's where the effort (and errors) usually lie...
Symbiote 6y ago
Instead of only considering a consultant, the company should have a developer on staff to work on small tasks like this. The cost gradually decreases as they learn the business and don't need everything explained from scratch.
- OzCrimson 6y ago
  See. You've got answers to something that you haven't asked a single question about. But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions. Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it was complex. For whatever reasons, that's not a report the DBA was up for developing from scratch (or, someone decided his time wasn't to be used that way). That's just the reality. We can talk about what should have been or what ought to have been, but that doesn't change the reality. The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.
  - deknos 6y ago
    > But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. Yes, like a janitor for example. > The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel. Yes it's the hammer for all your nails. You could also use Python+Jupyter. There are selfhosted and managed versions. Because of guys like you, municipial installations run their sewage system with an excel sheet because some guy implemented a vba macro to talk to the sewage api endpoint. let it go.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I think the company would quickly realize that they need a different solution if they have no Excel wizard on staff, and the team spends weeks just calculating sales commissions. Or maybe not, and they’d just hire more people solely to calculate commission :/
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    I would say that you probably do not know what you did wrong having done it in Excel. Stuff gets complicated really fast in Excel thus it’s much easier to do something that you can’t possibly debug and thus live in blissful ignorance.
iagovar 6y ago
Knime. Desktop app is free, is not as polished as alteryx but with some community love it will improve massively. It already is WAY better than Excel. Stuff is organized in a manner someone unfamiliar with data handling or programming can understand it. It takes a little bit to master, an some stuff (like looks and variable passing) is still unintuitive.
- dagaci 6y ago
  Is it just a better "Excel" or does it have some actual feature to prevent people making mistakes?
  - hermitcrab 6y ago
    It isn't a spreadsheet. It uses a visual data flow approach to transform data step by step from one form to another. This approach is much better for data transformation. It is also less error prone as operations take place on columns or rows of data, not cells. But you wouldn't try to create a set of company accounts with it.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    Take a look and you'll understand it right away. It's organized with nodes and links. Nodes perform operations, and links transport data between nodes. You can arrange them visually as you please. There's even stuff like "metanodes" that allow you to put nodes inside, so you don't have to have a messy playground. Most nodes (there are official and 3rd party nodes) do have error output, and there's a console to inspect what's going on. You can also inspect data visually in most nodes. Even someone who is not used to play with data, who doesn't understand consistency and yada yada will understand the advantages.
- viraptor 6y ago
  This is amazing. Thanks for pointing out knime. There were so many occasion since and including uni where I wish I could've used that.
  - iagovar 6y ago
n4r9 6y ago
Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.
- jasode 6y ago
  >, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not. This Libre Office question&answer[1] in 2020 says it guesses that the users want leading zeros removed from numbers. This behavior is similar to other software tools I looked at.[2] This means that if a csv has "02142021" as a date for Valentine's Day with a leading zero, it will be imported as number "2142021" -- unless one takes extra steps to prevent the default behavior. [1] https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-import-a-csv-in-calc-with-the-leading-zeros-that-are-in-the-csv-file/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-imp... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732
  - n4r9 6y ago
    Ok, it might try to deduce the data type, but you can set it in the import options that appear when you open a CSV file. Excel will automatically convert a string like "2-4" to "02-Feb" upon opening a CSV file. No import options appear when you open the file. If you then save the file it then uses that new string. As far as I can tell there's no way to stop it doing this.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  Gnumeric or Tex combined with R can help also... There is ages since I opened an excel and I don't miss it.
  - OzCrimson 6y ago
    BRAVO for you. And I mean that. You've got the tool YOU need and you haven't pushed YOUR tool on other people. Thank you.
numpad0 6y ago
- hypothetical Excel as a DB client app with MySQL as backend
sixhobbits 6y ago
Metabase (for reports rather than transformations) was useful to fill all the "cant we just have like a spreadsheet" requests while maintaining some quality

ssdspoimdsjvv 6y ago

Excel 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 ago
Again. 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.
- deknos 6y ago
  No. it's not the only alternative. it's the only thing you and many other accept. Python+Jupyter is a real alternative.
  - OzCrimson 6y ago
    You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.
    - deknos 6y ago
      exactly. because he does not see a problem with this because people like you tell him it's the only solution since dawn of excel. But when developers complain they have to learn domain specific items, people say the shall keep up with the times. but suddenly the analysts and the others are exempt from this?
- ssdspoimdsjvv 6y ago
  Real life doesn't always provide ideal solutions. In your case, using Excel is probably the easiest or even only way to do what's needed. That doesn't mean it's the best, or even a good solution. If it causes organization-wide problems, whoever runs your organization should make sure better processes are instilled. The only thing you can do is make it clear to the person above you and hope things improve.
  - OzCrimson 6y ago
    We're closer in agreement. And I'd never suggest that Excel was the best solution or even a good solution at times. (I hated the tedious error-prone things that I used to do in Excel.) I'm just offering the context from which weird stuff happens. And the answer isn't always as easy as: put it in a database. The context, the processes (or lack of processes), the decision-makers, budgets, timelines, they all play a part in the outcomes.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
"The right solution to their problem" being a developer, at least as far as developers are concerned. Hammers and nails...
- Moru 6y ago
  Sometimes that database feels more like a jetplane when all I need is a hammer for my nail. Excel (or libreoffice calc) is perfect for a lot of stuff, especially those small things that you won't ever do again.
  - OzCrimson 6y ago
    100%
  - bpiche 6y ago
    Excel is a UI over a database table. With a bunch of other UI driven math/stats functions built in. It really comes down to a difference between UI driven folks and folks that are code literate.
Pamar 6y ago
Your position is more reasonably explained than most of the Excel Haters' (I am a card carrying member of the group, btw) but there is an additional problem. Even if/when the "average Excel user" finally sees the Light ... s/he still has to work in an environment where excel files (including .csv) are the lingua franca. It's a bit like working for the German (or French or Japanese etc.) branch of a US large company. Of course the official language is English, and all documents should be written in English and emails should be in English and so on. Even if everybody (down to the Janitor?) speak acceptable English and are perfectly able to talk business in English... everyone will still use German unless they have to communicate with someone like me, whose German fluency is rated in Imaginary Numbers.

lloeki 6y ago

To me it seems Python or Julia notebook stuff like ipython or jupyter could (and did in some circles) displace Excel in almost all cases. The self-sustained inertia to change is real though.

OzCrimson 6y ago
Who's going to pay to train a Customer Service Rep, Admin Assistant, Sales Assistant or Warehouse Manager to do Python when there's Excel? Get into the world of the Excel user. Some of us do learn coding. But generally speaking? No. If it happens, it's on our own. And we can agree that spreadsheets have problems, and Excel users typically are not data people. BUT! When we agree on that, it becomes evident that a lot of suggested solutions are non-starters. Not all Excel users are in an enterprise that's throwing money around for training and dedicated software. I'd like to see the Warehouse Manager who goes in Monday morning and says to the company vice-president, "I've been looking into this Python class ... "
- rjtavares 6y ago
  The problem isn't businesses using Excel, the problem is businesses using Excel for critical processes. The Warehouse Manager or Sales Assistant doesn't need to learn an alternative, but e.g. the Finance people should. PowerBI/Tableau for reporting and R/Python for modelling should be a thing in those worlds (even if Excel continues to be an amazing tool for entry level stuff and some quick number crunching).
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > PowerBI/Tableau for reporting In my experience these take ages to load data that is near instant on Excel. I can totally see how people prefer excel.
    - rjtavares 6y ago
      It may take longer to load, but it allows you to automate the data processing. That's where the effort (and errors) usually lie...

Symbiote 6y ago

Instead of only considering a consultant, the company should have a developer on staff to work on small tasks like this. The cost gradually decreases as they learn the business and don't need everything explained from scratch.

OzCrimson 6y ago
See. You've got answers to something that you haven't asked a single question about. But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions. Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it was complex. For whatever reasons, that's not a report the DBA was up for developing from scratch (or, someone decided his time wasn't to be used that way). That's just the reality. We can talk about what should have been or what ought to have been, but that doesn't change the reality. The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.
- deknos 6y ago
  > But in your judgement the company should have had the right developer on staff. Yes, like a janitor for example. > The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel. Yes it's the hammer for all your nails. You could also use Python+Jupyter. There are selfhosted and managed versions. Because of guys like you, municipial installations run their sewage system with an excel sheet because some guy implemented a vba macro to talk to the sewage api endpoint. let it go.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I think the company would quickly realize that they need a different solution if they have no Excel wizard on staff, and the team spends weeks just calculating sales commissions. Or maybe not, and they’d just hire more people solely to calculate commission :/
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  I would say that you probably do not know what you did wrong having done it in Excel. Stuff gets complicated really fast in Excel thus it’s much easier to do something that you can’t possibly debug and thus live in blissful ignorance.

iagovar 6y ago

Knime. Desktop app is free, is not as polished as alteryx but with some community love it will improve massively. It already is WAY better than Excel. Stuff is organized in a manner someone unfamiliar with data handling or programming can understand it. It takes a little bit to master, an some stuff (like looks and variable passing) is still unintuitive.

dagaci 6y ago
Is it just a better "Excel" or does it have some actual feature to prevent people making mistakes?
- hermitcrab 6y ago
  It isn't a spreadsheet. It uses a visual data flow approach to transform data step by step from one form to another. This approach is much better for data transformation. It is also less error prone as operations take place on columns or rows of data, not cells. But you wouldn't try to create a set of company accounts with it.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Take a look and you'll understand it right away. It's organized with nodes and links. Nodes perform operations, and links transport data between nodes. You can arrange them visually as you please. There's even stuff like "metanodes" that allow you to put nodes inside, so you don't have to have a messy playground. Most nodes (there are official and 3rd party nodes) do have error output, and there's a console to inspect what's going on. You can also inspect data visually in most nodes. Even someone who is not used to play with data, who doesn't understand consistency and yada yada will understand the advantages.
viraptor 6y ago
This is amazing. Thanks for pointing out knime. There were so many occasion since and including uni where I wish I could've used that.
- iagovar 6y ago

n4r9 6y ago

Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

jasode 6y ago
>, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not. This Libre Office question&answer[1] in 2020 says it guesses that the users want leading zeros removed from numbers. This behavior is similar to other software tools I looked at.[2] This means that if a csv has "02142021" as a date for Valentine's Day with a leading zero, it will be imported as number "2142021" -- unless one takes extra steps to prevent the default behavior. [1] https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-import-a-csv-in-calc-with-the-leading-zeros-that-are-in-the-csv-file/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-imp... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732
- n4r9 6y ago
  Ok, it might try to deduce the data type, but you can set it in the import options that appear when you open a CSV file. Excel will automatically convert a string like "2-4" to "02-Feb" upon opening a CSV file. No import options appear when you open the file. If you then save the file it then uses that new string. As far as I can tell there's no way to stop it doing this.
pvaldes 6y ago
Gnumeric or Tex combined with R can help also... There is ages since I opened an excel and I don't miss it.
- OzCrimson 6y ago
  BRAVO for you. And I mean that. You've got the tool YOU need and you haven't pushed YOUR tool on other people. Thank you.

numpad0 6y ago

- hypothetical Excel as a DB client app with MySQL as backend

sixhobbits 6y ago

Metabase (for reports rather than transformations) was useful to fill all the "cant we just have like a spreadsheet" requests while maintaining some quality