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The funny thing is I've seen folks try to deploy software to get rid of spreadsheets. It always ends badly to terribly. Spreadsheets are the nonprogrammers pro
by glzone1 2y ago
The funny thing is I've seen folks try to deploy software to get rid of spreadsheets. It always ends badly to terribly.
Spreadsheets are the nonprogrammers programming / modeling tool in business.
It does presentation, data filtering / sorting, modeling and more.
No AI needed (and you can now plug AI in in some cases).
- ants_everywhere 2y agoSure, but here's the basic problem I think: Suppose you have some formula that computes a financial metric for your company. Someone you've shared it with drunkenly fat-fingers the formula 3/4 of the way down a long row, and that causes all entries below it to recompute with the wrong formula. Unless the change is really drastic, you may never know it happened. And this sort of mistake -- basically a typo or a bad mouse movement -- happens daily in every company in the world in some spreadsheet. Often people will notice the mistake, but not with probability 1. Software engineers have mechanisms to guard against some of these mistakes, and even we have a hard time getting people to take code review or tests seriously. What is the guard in the spreadsheet world?
- anthk 2y agoHave you seen the Excel disaster on genomics? Enough to ban Excel for anything serious except for accounting.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoI had not heard of that, but it appears to be this https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4