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As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management (specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of enterpri

by cmbaus 14y ago

As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management (specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of enterprise reporting in flux. In finance, most documents are still laid out for print (PDFs, Word Docs, and even PowerPoints), but users are printing them less frequently and viewing them either online or on their tablets, and IMO the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be frustrating (see: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic), but change is inevitable.

supercanuck 14y ago
Tell me about it. I run into this a lot. Companies spend these vast fortunes on ERP and Data warehouses only to have the final output be PDF Crystal Report documents or 500,000 line item exports into Excel.
- cmbaus 14y ago
  As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency. I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
  - memset 14y ago
    I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!

by cmbaus 14y ago

supercanuck 14y ago

Tell me about it. I run into this a lot. Companies spend these vast fortunes on ERP and Data warehouses only to have the final output be PDF Crystal Report documents or 500,000 line item exports into Excel.

cmbaus 14y ago
As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency. I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
- memset 14y ago
  I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!