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It's not about autonomy in an abstract sense. It's the fact that regular people can customize, hack, modify, automate, and otherwise program the spreadsheet. Da
by nerdponx 5y ago
It's not about autonomy in an abstract sense. It's the fact that regular people can customize, hack, modify, automate, and otherwise program the spreadsheet. Data analysts and managers are more than trained monkeys; they actually need to do those kinds of things (at least sometimes) in order to do their jobs.
I agree that the ideal world is one where you can connect the spreadsheets to other data sources, so you get the best of both.
- lupire 5y agoODBC is decades old
- syshum 5y agoThis is a double edge sword, because often time there is no one validing the results of the spread sheets... "The number looks ok" is not a good validation, and there has been some very public data errors as a result of bad spreadsheets. I often wondered if in the average business is even 10% of the spreadsheets where actually audited what would happen.... I suspect the results would be rather shocking
- nerdponx 5y agoIndeed, and I think this is the real problem with non-programmer/data people working with spreadsheets. The problem isn't the spreadsheet interface itself. The problem is that people are doing what amounts to engineering without any training in engineering and no sense of best practices.
- doliveira 5y agoI'm not sure if I should be proud of this or not, but once I had some pretty critical field values in a Excel spreadsheet that I had to make sure were compatible with my code. I ended up adding some derived formulas in a new locked sheet within the file, committed the XLSX to Git and then created a JUnit test to make sure everything was in sync. In a nutshell, the XLSX became the source of truth
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bigDinosaur 5y agoYup, and this is frequently a total disaster. Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars get lost either in spreadsheet errors or by paying the salaries of people who manage spreadsheets when their jobs could probably be replaced by a much better solution. But, whatever - more work for everyone! Certainly suits me. It's like wanting the average person to keep programming C because you're in infosec.
- m_mueller 5y agoPower Query / Power BI is pretty much that, treating spreadsheets as one source among others, with transformations and analytics on top.