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Write a piece of software that ends Excel’s dominance and then I will take your opinion seriously. I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.

• oneplane 2y ago
  Which 'opinion' would that be. The one where I write about anecdotes from the real world? We have software that does what is needed. An ERP, a CRM, a HMI, a case management system for legal etc. No need to have everyone on every team rebuild that in excel.
  • Affric 2y ago
    That all iterate too slowly and don’t put the development in the hands of the people doing the job. Excel is near universal and flexible. It’s not a hammer. It’s a swiss army knife.
    • oneplane 2y ago
      You make it sound like their job is development (it's not). If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel. The same goes for collaborating with 100 people outside of your team, they are not going to keep tracking your personal DIY projects, they work with a common infrastructure so it's actually feasible to work instead of being busy playing engineer all day.
      • Affric 2y ago
        Except without a way to get the computer to behave the way they want they have an arm strung behind their back in the modern economy. EDIT: I think my experience could likely be in a situation very different to yours. Thinking about it more deeply I am describing an org up to its neck in tech debt and in a changing market where regulation is tighter than ever. So, I think the pathologies are definitely more specific than universal.
        • oneplane 2y ago
          That's not what our users tell us, and we're beating the competition so I guess you're either wrong or not familiar with the market we're in.
          • fuzzfactor 2y ago
            >If your job is to manage legal cases, you have no business writing case management software. That includes writing it in excel. So true, but not everybody runs a company like it was a business :\ You may have to turn over every rock, but you just might find some bureaucracy "occasionally". If your job is to manage X cases which have traditionally been done without a computer, you have the greatest advantage if you can outperform your peers when they don't have a computer either. If X case management software is then adopted, there will once again be a level playing field, the traditional leader maintains their traditional leadership as long as that is something that is effectively leveraged by the software. Otherwise, less-naturally-outperforming leadership may prevail once software comes on the scene, and it could very well be impossible for the previously-leading professional to compare with a peer who is also capable of writing the software themselves. Especially when there is good commercial or open-source software already. That way the domain expert having the programming ability doesn't have to spend time programming, but the insight into procuring software and creating workflows can't be matched after a certain point. Just because they actually are capable of programming it themselves if they really had to.
• wruza 2y ago
  Excel is king of cancer that you’ll implore to cut out once you realize it slowly kills your business. A perfect trap for novice entrepreneurs. 30% of my jobs when I was in integration was unfucking folders of folders of irregular xls built by users, and sometimes we just failed due to the sheer amount of crap which was in motion and had to be transitioned atomically. It never worked first and second time, so we had to do waves of complex transitions with parallel accounting (double workload on an already suffocating business), until things failed rarely enough to be scheduled as regular bug fixing tasks.
  • Affric 2y ago
    How did you fix the user habits in the end?
    • wruza 2y ago
      I don’t think it’s fixable. Excel enables chaotic “development” and it just happens. In the end we either left them with a system they ordered or bailed out cause it wasn’t worth it. Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
      • listenallyall 2y ago
        And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.
        • wruza 2y ago
          Not sure why you’re assuming the worst of me here.
          • listenallyall 2y ago
            a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal. It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.