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> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app. F
by debo_ 10mo ago
> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app.
Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally accessible.
- nesarkvechnep 10mo agoI’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.
- crubier 10mo agoStreamlit apps or similar are doing a great job at this where I'm at. As simple to build and deploy as Excel, but with the right data types, the right UI, the right access and version control, the right programming language that LLMs understand, the right SW ecosystem and packages, etc.
- SauntSolaire 10mo agoAre they actually as simply to deploy as Excel? My guess would be that most streamlit apps never make it further than the computer they're written on.
- crubier 10mo agoIf you have the right tooling (e.g. Streamlit.io) then yes, literally. To 'deploy' an Excel file I go to Office365 and create my excel file and hit share To 'deploy' a Streamlit file I go to Streamlit and write my single file python code (can be a one liner) and hit share
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- tehjoker 10mo agomaybe the strategy in those cases is to augment the core spreadsheet with tools that can unit test it and broadcast changes etc
- esafak 10mo agoProgramming in a spreadsheet is an anti-pattern. Does anyone review your workflow? Write tests for it? Use a real programming language; a notebook at least.
- martinald 10mo agoAuthor here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them. Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.
- tonyarkles 10mo agoCounterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck. That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams will do whatever they need to do to get their jobs done, whether or not IT is going to be helpful in that effort.
- chasd00 10mo agoi've seen many attempts to turn a widely used spreadsheet into a webapp. Eventually, it becomes an attempt to re-implement spreadsheets. The first time something changes and the user says "well in Excel i would just do this..." the dev team is off chasing existing features of excel for eternity and the users are pissed because it takes so long and is buggy, meanwhile, excel is right there ready and waiting.
- thingortwo 10mo agoI always see this point mentioned in "App VS Spreadsheet" but no one gives a concrete example. The whole point of using a "purpose" build app is to give some structure and consistency to the problem. If people are replicating spreadsheet feature then they needed "excel" to begin with since that is a purpose built tool for generalizing a lot of problems. It's like I can say well my notebook and pen is already in front of me, I can use this why would I ever bother opening an app? well because the app provides some additional value.
- Anamon 10mo ago
- robotresearcher 10mo agoSpreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them. But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.
- ASalazarMX 10mo agoIt's astounding how useful and intuitive they are, but my biggest gripe is how easy is for anyone to mess calculations, say, SUM(<RANGE>), by simply adding one row/column/cell. I use Google Worksheets frequently to track new things that fit into lists/tables, and giving someone else editor access without them knowing a few worksheet nuances means I have to recheck and correct them every month or two.
- robotresearcher 10mo agoDoes anyone make a sanity checker for Excel or Sheets that notices things like that? Would be incredibly helpful!
- MrDresden 10mo agoThis happened not so many years ago, in a certain small European nation, where official government housing valuation numbers were incorrect for some years due to a flaw in a spreadsheet. I remember my apartment got a ~10% bump in value one year due to this flaw being fixed (fix didn't apply to all housing, just those who were on floors 5 or above). I don't think though that a SaaS would have solved anything here.
- jimbokun 10mo agoBetter security. Better availability. Less chance of losing data. Assuming the SaaS is implemented competently, of course. Otherwise there's not much advantage.
- frm88 10mo agoI disagree. I have seen many such Excel applications in many companies, paticularly in the finance and controlling departments that were delivering key numbers to the C-class which would never have allowed the sheets, applications or calculations out of the house, let alone to a cloud service or an out-of-company consultant/programmer. There were always backups managed by the department themselves and in one case, even entry to the room with the relevant machine was restricted to authorised personnel only. If I have learned anything in my 30 years of consulting, it's that you always take Finance at its word when they tell you No to your SaaS or ERP solution.
- croes 10mo agoAnd often the are unmaintainable because the original author left the company and the users don’t really know what the spreadsheet does which leads to unrecognized bugs and errors especially in spreadsheets with lots of data
- tgv 10mo agoLet's not forget: it's pretty unlikely that two orgs come up with the same administration/data-analyis for which they use those spreadsheets, so most of those proposed SaaS applications would have just one customer. There is of course SAP for common problems.
- jl6 10mo agoSpreadsheets are absolutely the right solution for a great many problems. The important thing to recognize is when a problem has outgrown a spreadsheet solution. That’s usually when you start to use a spreadsheet as a database, or when it has more than a handful of users. It’s a rare spreadsheet that survives its original creator.
- trashb 10mo agoSpreadsheets are powerful, but often abused. They are great for economics but horrible for logic. Most medium to large complex spreadsheets are better implemented in a high level programming language. Spreadsheets seem useful for people that are scared of programming syntax but quickly become so much less maintainable and janky that I believe its almost always easier to just start with learning to program already. Especially excel is 100% jank.