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The biggest no-code app I see in companies is Excel. It doesn't matter what you feel about it. If the data can fit an xlsx, it will be an excel sheet with macro

The biggest no-code app I see in companies is Excel. It doesn't matter what you feel about it. If the data can fit an xlsx, it will be an excel sheet with macro.

Larrikin 4y ago
Are there any good examples of these amazing excel files that get passed around in companies? Nearly all examples I've seen are toy examples from college, simple imports of large csv files with some graphs added, or rarely interesting projects where someone creates a work of art with the cells. Friends and colleagues seem to manipulate data using tools like panda, R, or even Power Bi.
- sandermvanvliet 4y ago
  I used to work in a team for a risk management department of a large bank. The excel sheets that the modellers were coming up with were pretty, shall we say, interesting. They basically built the app we were supposed to be building… but in Excel and then handed us the file saying “Here’s the spec” It worked quite well actually
  - tsm 4y ago
    I had this exact same experience working as a dev for a property insurance startup
- phonon 4y ago
  https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/icse-seip-15.pdf https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/icse-seip-15.pd... https://github.com/SheetJS/enron_xls https://github.com/SheetJS/enron_xls
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Those sorts of Excel projects generally aren't available in open source (or source-readable) projects. My first "real" programming job was to convert an Excel based report into one done with a general purpose programming language (we chose Python) because the reports were taking hours to generate in Excel and each report file was over a gigabyte in size. If it were simple static reports it would probably have been easy, but minor modifications were necessary every week, and the analytics team was terrible at conveying what was actually required without actually doing it in the excel, so management decided our program had to generate a more optimized version of the original Excel file as output to give to the analytics team to then work on. After like 3 months of work on this, I figured out how to just write a tiny python script to remove the unnecessary data from their excel files. It made it so they could open it on their cheaper laptops without grinding to a halt and generate the modified report in few minutes. And we didn't have to try to replicate an Excel formula structure that had been iterated on for over 5 years into python, and our team was moved to better tasks. I've also worked on complex language localization projects that probably would have been most optimally handled by a database connected application, but it's way easier to send an Excel file to contracted translators, so that's what we used. I've heard other horror stories from friends who work in finance. But they work, so whatever.
- chupchap 4y ago
  A manufacturing company I consulted with had an excel file with VB for generating labels and code in a very specific way. A realty company had the whole post sale process driven off three excel files referencing each other. Each file belonged to a different department in the company (engineering, finance, collection for example). It all comes down to a few macros, vlookups and sometimes a bit of VB magic sprinkled in.
kgeist 4y ago
I do resource planning for my team with Google Sheets and it's been OK so far for my needs but often I wish it was more automated and less error-prone.

The biggest no-code app I see in companies is Excel. It doesn't matter what you feel about it. If the data can fit an xlsx, it will be an excel sheet with macro.

Larrikin 4y ago

Are there any good examples of these amazing excel files that get passed around in companies? Nearly all examples I've seen are toy examples from college, simple imports of large csv files with some graphs added, or rarely interesting projects where someone creates a work of art with the cells. Friends and colleagues seem to manipulate data using tools like panda, R, or even Power Bi.

sandermvanvliet 4y ago
I used to work in a team for a risk management department of a large bank. The excel sheets that the modellers were coming up with were pretty, shall we say, interesting. They basically built the app we were supposed to be building… but in Excel and then handed us the file saying “Here’s the spec” It worked quite well actually
- tsm 4y ago
  I had this exact same experience working as a dev for a property insurance startup
phonon 4y ago
https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/icse-seip-15.pdf https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/papers/icse-seip-15.pd... https://github.com/SheetJS/enron_xls https://github.com/SheetJS/enron_xls
squeaky-clean 4y ago
Those sorts of Excel projects generally aren't available in open source (or source-readable) projects. My first "real" programming job was to convert an Excel based report into one done with a general purpose programming language (we chose Python) because the reports were taking hours to generate in Excel and each report file was over a gigabyte in size. If it were simple static reports it would probably have been easy, but minor modifications were necessary every week, and the analytics team was terrible at conveying what was actually required without actually doing it in the excel, so management decided our program had to generate a more optimized version of the original Excel file as output to give to the analytics team to then work on. After like 3 months of work on this, I figured out how to just write a tiny python script to remove the unnecessary data from their excel files. It made it so they could open it on their cheaper laptops without grinding to a halt and generate the modified report in few minutes. And we didn't have to try to replicate an Excel formula structure that had been iterated on for over 5 years into python, and our team was moved to better tasks. I've also worked on complex language localization projects that probably would have been most optimally handled by a database connected application, but it's way easier to send an Excel file to contracted translators, so that's what we used. I've heard other horror stories from friends who work in finance. But they work, so whatever.
chupchap 4y ago
A manufacturing company I consulted with had an excel file with VB for generating labels and code in a very specific way. A realty company had the whole post sale process driven off three excel files referencing each other. Each file belonged to a different department in the company (engineering, finance, collection for example). It all comes down to a few macros, vlookups and sometimes a bit of VB magic sprinkled in.

kgeist 4y ago

I do resource planning for my team with Google Sheets and it's been OK so far for my needs but often I wish it was more automated and less error-prone.