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I work in mega project engineering (O&G, mining, etc.) where it is absolutely frightening how much data is generated via cobbled-together spreadsheets with unve
by achr2 6y ago
I work in mega project engineering (O&G, mining, etc.) where it is absolutely frightening how much data is generated via cobbled-together spreadsheets with unverifiable calculations and no change tracking. Excel is a nightmare to me.
- dmaevsky 6y agoI hear you. It's probably the same situation everywhere apart the IT industry itself :) if that.... What kind of tools are you currently using to manage the nightmare?
- achr2 6y agoDifferent approaches for different aspects. For discipline calculation sheets, there is not much other than having a basic file-level version control and validation engines for importing the data. For other areas, I have built pipelines that maintain diff-able JSON in a repo and handle converting to-from a spreadsheet for their 'UI'. We are also always using or building integrated solutions for data and calculation capturing. My personal push is to introduce discipline engineers to things like Jupyter notebook for "hand" calculations.
- mint2 6y agoI see these “everyone gush about how great excel is” threads and I always recoil in horror and go in to see if there’s anyone who agrees with my perplexingly minority viewpoint. For trivial things and certain specific use cases spreadsheets are fine. But it never is left at that. For lack of awareness of any other programming language they get used for programming and analytics platforms and turn into byzantine, unmaintainable, undocumented beasts with hard to read and check formulas and business logic. My current company is plagued by these built by no-coders over decades. There’s teams of people whose primary job function is to click copy and paste between these to generate regular reports. Excel is a curse.