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I recently read the biography of Jeremy Heywood, who was the UK's Cabinet Secretary—essentially the leader of the civil service and the person in charge of maki
by Veen 6y ago
I recently read the biography of Jeremy Heywood, who was the UK's Cabinet Secretary—essentially the leader of the civil service and the person in charge of making sure the government functions. Excel got several mentions, and the book gives the impression that our government, including the Treasury, more or less runs on spreadsheets.
- bombcar 6y agoThis is true of most if not all of the business world. It runs on spreadsheets, apps that imitate spreadsheets, or hand-built spreadsheet equivalents.
- p_l 6y agoIf that scares you... never look at how sausage is made in FMCG world. One of the major companies in that area essentially uses Excel as standard data format, that is exchanged by applications etc. Capo di tutti capi of the company (i.e. the CEO of the overall controlling entity of the whole multinational) might be woken up if, by the end of the month, a bunch of Excel/CSV files aren't exported from a certain database, feeding a bunch of downstream applications, which in turn will provide Excel files to employees. The less insane use of Excel there was as human interface, where Excel files were used both to query external services, but also as input files/forms that could be sent as attachment and "cosigned" by appropriate person.