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"Excel is like a user-friendly nuclear power plant. An amateur operator might be able to keep it running most of the time, and most of his mistakes won't be ser
by aleyan 14y ago
"Excel is like a user-friendly nuclear power plant. An amateur operator might be able to keep it running most of the time, and most of his mistakes won't be serious. But the wrong mistake can blow up your business."
Yeah, running huge Excel sheets is a risk. Running huge Excel sheets with VBA is a risk and a pain. Powering Excel with python is a step in definitely a step in the right direction and would save me personally a lot of pain and boost my productivity right now.
Unfortunately it is a step I can not take. Excel is supported by Microsoft and Excel Bloomberg plugin is supported by Bloomberg. DataNitro is supported by a company founded last year that doesn't have single person's name in their About Us or Contact Us pages. If I was to build a sheet depending on their technology, would a wrong misstep two years down the line blow up my business?
- kylered 14y agoI've used Excel Bloomberg plugins before and I can vouch for their power and frequent use in the financial industry.
- cgio 14y agoWe should not confuse procurement risks with usage risks. In general, the risk with Excel, as indicated in all these articles, does not come from the vendor but from the user. Your systemic risk is always bounded below by the highest risk you are facing, which is user incompetence. Even with power users you still get errors. The main negative differentiator for Excel is that these errors are sometimes hard to identify.
- karamazov 14y agoHi Aleyan, I'm one of the founders of DataNitro. We went through YC last summer, and the company's stable and funded. While I can't guarantee that we'll be around forever, we will be here for at least a few years. If you use DataNitro for your business, we'll work with you to make sure that our technology works for as long as you need it. I'll add some personal info to the "About Us" page soon, too.