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I think a lot of the love for Excel by office workers comes down to empowerment. Workers like being empowered to solve their own problems. Excel does very well.

I think a lot of the love for Excel by office workers comes down to empowerment. Workers like being empowered to solve their own problems. Excel does very well. You as a non-programmer office worker can quickly make a spreadsheet that solves your problem. You can update it on your schedule as your problem changes or to explore new possibilities. You give that up as soon as you go to a CRUD app. Need to change something, put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky. Wheat would have been a few minute feedback loop with Excel is a multi-week slog. There is no other tool of which I am aware that enables the common person to sit down at a computer and make the computer do useful real world work work for them in a flexible way than Excel. I have used it for budgets, lists, form entry, and reports. In addition, it provides a very smooth on ramp into programming via the record macro button, which will write the VBA function that does what you are doing in the GUI. Most of my VBA functions started out as record macro, and then were edited to generalize. Truly an amazing piece of software.

Spooky23 6y ago
Exactly. As a service owner of some fairly significant technology services, every time one of my colleagues “fixes” some business problem with an enterprise IT system, it’s measurably worse than a well-defined excel driven process. My favorite was when our travel and expense system moved to some Oracle monstrosity, and we literally hired full time staff to data enter expenses that were submitted on paper because field service folks were spending 5-10 hours a week on expense submission. Another great example is when almost anything is “improved” by some sort of quick and dirty interim servicenow task.
- fpoling 6y ago
  Well, I observed the opposite effect when a complex Excel spreadsheet was replaced by an Access DB that allowed a small company to discover that they had extra assets for like 200K USD. And the original Excel author realized how much more sense the data made once he saw visualization of data constraints and relations. But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Oh totally. My beef is that tech folk have a tendency to make themselves the customer, or maximize convenience to IT over whatever the actual problem is. Internally, the politics of the company tend to dictate this stuff. In the marketplace, software is usually much better!
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      I think this can be distilled as "most tech folk are extremely bad at valuing each business use case separately." Tech folks: That's a business use case Business users: This is something I do 500x a day, this I do 10x a day, this I do once a month PMs are supposed to be the ones to do this work, but they tend to be technically clueless and blinded by project timeline spreadsheets. BAs usually don't take the time to actually ask the user "Why are you doing this?" and get all the nuances.
techsupporter 6y ago
> Need to change something, put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky. If the change happens at all. The IT department might say "we don't have the time to do that," or "other users depend on the app being like this so we can't change it to be like that," or even "why do you need that, your justification isn't good enough." Excel is the non-programmer or non-admin equivalent of "I'll just bang that out in [php | python | perl | powershell]." We've all done it, we will all continue to do it, and yes it will look like an absolute mess...that probably winds up powering a Fortune 50 company.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Moreover, in most non-software companies, IT has covered their asses by prohibiting users from accessing programming tools. I get that most of us live in a land of "Of course I have an IDE and compilers / REPL" at work. You know what IDE and compiler IT can't take away? And the last option that's always available at any company? Excel.
  - formercoder 6y ago
    Ah but most secretly have Powershell which is super powerful.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      And .NET compilers actually, living on C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      My IT department contacted me because their "security" software alerted them that I ran a Powershell command.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      I've contracted in places where cmd is blocked, but Powershell is not. The mind boggles. (For those cursed to work in Windows enterprise land, most of what is being talked about here is that Powershell is essentially .Net, e.g. '$DateTime = New-Object System.DateTime -ArgumentList 2015, 10, 10') https://mcpmag.com/articles/2015/11/04/net-members-in-powershell.aspx?m=1 https://mcpmag.com/articles/2015/11/04/net-members-in-powers...
uncledave 6y ago
A point to note on Excel's empowerment I have discovered. The main reason for its ubiquity is because it's mostly already there and doesn't require the odious purchase order process to be navigated and then an odious IT onboarding process navigated. So fuck that, let's just cram another turd into Excel. That sort of overlaps with your IT request thing but at a higher level I think.
- tomrod 6y ago
  We economists call this rational, as folks are minimizing their costs. IT says no to or unnecessarily complicates acquiring a needed product? Fine. In Excel it goes. It never matters how un-auditable the mess is. That never enters the calculus.
  - sam_bristow 6y ago
    You could also say that it's IT externalising their costs. They don't want to be responsible for another system, so all the work and maintenance gets pushed on to end users.
    - tomrod 6y ago
      Indeed!
spaetzleesser 6y ago
" put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky." A week would be brilliant. Months or years is more realistic. And every change has to go through five levels of management and business analysts before it goes to some clueless people at an outsourcing company and costs insane money.

Spooky23 6y ago

Exactly. As a service owner of some fairly significant technology services, every time one of my colleagues “fixes” some business problem with an enterprise IT system, it’s measurably worse than a well-defined excel driven process. My favorite was when our travel and expense system moved to some Oracle monstrosity, and we literally hired full time staff to data enter expenses that were submitted on paper because field service folks were spending 5-10 hours a week on expense submission. Another great example is when almost anything is “improved” by some sort of quick and dirty interim servicenow task.

fpoling 6y ago
Well, I observed the opposite effect when a complex Excel spreadsheet was replaced by an Access DB that allowed a small company to discover that they had extra assets for like 200K USD. And the original Excel author realized how much more sense the data made once he saw visualization of data constraints and relations. But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Oh totally. My beef is that tech folk have a tendency to make themselves the customer, or maximize convenience to IT over whatever the actual problem is. Internally, the politics of the company tend to dictate this stuff. In the marketplace, software is usually much better!
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I think this can be distilled as "most tech folk are extremely bad at valuing each business use case separately." Tech folks: That's a business use case Business users: This is something I do 500x a day, this I do 10x a day, this I do once a month PMs are supposed to be the ones to do this work, but they tend to be technically clueless and blinded by project timeline spreadsheets. BAs usually don't take the time to actually ask the user "Why are you doing this?" and get all the nuances.

techsupporter 6y ago

> Need to change something, put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky. If the change happens at all. The IT department might say "we don't have the time to do that," or "other users depend on the app being like this so we can't change it to be like that," or even "why do you need that, your justification isn't good enough." Excel is the non-programmer or non-admin equivalent of "I'll just bang that out in [php | python | perl | powershell]." We've all done it, we will all continue to do it, and yes it will look like an absolute mess...that probably winds up powering a Fortune 50 company.

ethbr0 6y ago
Moreover, in most non-software companies, IT has covered their asses by prohibiting users from accessing programming tools. I get that most of us live in a land of "Of course I have an IDE and compilers / REPL" at work. You know what IDE and compiler IT can't take away? And the last option that's always available at any company? Excel.
- formercoder 6y ago
  Ah but most secretly have Powershell which is super powerful.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And .NET compilers actually, living on C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    My IT department contacted me because their "security" software alerted them that I ran a Powershell command.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    I've contracted in places where cmd is blocked, but Powershell is not. The mind boggles. (For those cursed to work in Windows enterprise land, most of what is being talked about here is that Powershell is essentially .Net, e.g. '$DateTime = New-Object System.DateTime -ArgumentList 2015, 10, 10') https://mcpmag.com/articles/2015/11/04/net-members-in-powershell.aspx?m=1 https://mcpmag.com/articles/2015/11/04/net-members-in-powers...

uncledave 6y ago

A point to note on Excel's empowerment I have discovered. The main reason for its ubiquity is because it's mostly already there and doesn't require the odious purchase order process to be navigated and then an odious IT onboarding process navigated. So fuck that, let's just cram another turd into Excel. That sort of overlaps with your IT request thing but at a higher level I think.

tomrod 6y ago
We economists call this rational, as folks are minimizing their costs. IT says no to or unnecessarily complicates acquiring a needed product? Fine. In Excel it goes. It never matters how un-auditable the mess is. That never enters the calculus.
- sam_bristow 6y ago
  You could also say that it's IT externalising their costs. They don't want to be responsible for another system, so all the work and maintenance gets pushed on to end users.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    Indeed!

spaetzleesser 6y ago

" put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky." A week would be brilliant. Months or years is more realistic. And every change has to go through five levels of management and business analysts before it goes to some clueless people at an outsourcing company and costs insane money.