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Correction: Everyone thinks they know Excel and even an intern can make breaking changes. Excel highly encourages what would be considered insane development p
by YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Correction: Everyone thinks they know Excel and even an intern can make breaking changes.
Excel highly encourages what would be considered insane development practices anywhere else (copy-paste code, single-character variable names, no version control, mixing code and data, mixing front-end code and back-end code, no unit, regression or integration tests, development on live systems). As a result, any nontrivial Excel spreadsheet end up being far more brittle than the same solution coded up by even a well below-average coder. Sure, maybe with extreme discipline these can be avoided, but Summer Intern Derek doesn't have said discipline.
- johannes1234321 4y agoThe thing is: The knowledge is in understanding the business and business process. The ones who grasp that know Excel good enough to build a solution, which works for them (especially as they also know the builtin assumptions and limitations) Transferring that knowledge to a software department (and then limitations back) is quite complex and fails more often than not, leaving the business side with a software they don't want to use and can't adapt and quickly go back to Excel ("I understand it! I can adapt it!") and use the official tool only where required with hesitation. And yes, the Excel tool reaches a messy point, but it's built over years step by step, tied to the process changes.