4 ms·

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 o

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...
    - OzCrimson 6y ago
      How do you have so many answers to situations you haven't been in? Do I need to say it again? My Excel skills were necessary because of garbage in databases. I could sit at my desk; extract a data-dump of 50k rows of data; locate the fuzzy matches, identify which records needed to be kept and which ones deleted; merge it with the client's spreadsheet that they emailed to me and compare them; identify problems and report back to the angry client. Why was the client angry? Because of inflexible garbage reports coming out of the database that people were blindly trusting. Why was there garbage in the database? Not because of Excel.

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...
  - OzCrimson 6y ago
    How do you have so many answers to situations you haven't been in? Do I need to say it again? My Excel skills were necessary because of garbage in databases. I could sit at my desk; extract a data-dump of 50k rows of data; locate the fuzzy matches, identify which records needed to be kept and which ones deleted; merge it with the client's spreadsheet that they emailed to me and compare them; identify problems and report back to the angry client. Why was the client angry? Because of inflexible garbage reports coming out of the database that people were blindly trusting. Why was there garbage in the database? Not because of Excel.