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Damn Excel – How the 'most important application' is ruining the world

133 points by akkartik 14y ago

pesenti 14y ago
The problem with Reinhardt-Rogoff has nothing to do with Excel. It was a programing error that could have happened anywhere. The problem is that it took them years to reluctantly share their spreadsheet. Open data research and computation is the solution to that problem.
- wyday 14y ago
  Exactly. A bad workman always blames his tools.
  - klodolph 14y ago
    Partly because a bad workman chooses poor tools to begin with. Tools do matter. It's easier to find a mistake in say, an SQL query or some R code than it is to find a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet, where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells.
    - niggler 14y ago
      > where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells. Excel does a pretty good job in highlighting which cells are selected when you edit a formula, and it does a pretty good job of maintaining the meaning of the formula under sheet transformations. For example, if you inserted a row between rows 8 and 9 then the two formulae would be =SUM(A3:A13) and =SUM(A3:A11) respectively. This may have been a genuine error, but the two researchers definitely started the process with a goal in mind, and when the results agreed with their goals they didn't bother to check.
      - klodolph 14y ago
        Yes, it does highlight the cells. But if a mistake does somehow make it in, it is still exceptionally tedious to find the error. It is easy enough to expand a formula for additional cells but accidentally miss a cell, leaving it with the old formula. If you were using SQL, R, or Python, this class of error would never happen.
        niggler 14y ago
        Recent versions of excel do warn you if formulas omit adjacent cells. I agree with your sentiment to some extent but with excel 2011/2013 you have to actively suppress these warnings.
        flatfilefan 14y ago
        I guess it is just that to do a proper audit you need to have your logic on one page. Otherwise it is extreemly hard to follow the code. In excel every formula is sitting essentially on it's own page. It is easy to code this way but hard to audit.
      - yummyfajitas 14y ago
        This may have been a genuine error, but the two researchers definitely started the process with a goal in mind... What would that goal be? According to Megan Mcardle, Rogoff was a mild proponent of stimulus. For example, he said this in 2012: "Back in 2008-9, there was a reasonable chance, maybe 20% that we’d end up in another Great Depression. Spending a trillion dollars is nothing to knock that off the table." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/17/did-reinhart-and-rogoff-flub-a-major-statistic.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/17/did-reinhar...
    - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
      I'm not sure I understand why it is easier with SQL than Excel. Both seem to offer similar roadblocks and both seem to offer similar solutions. I think we're thinking there is a technological solution to a human problem, and personally I don't think there is or could ever be. This is a process problem. And by process I mean the process of building complex datasets, validating them for "correctness," and judging the quality/correctness of different data sets. Unit tests are a massive asset to programmers. I wonder if unit tests (i.e. "sanity checks") would also help in this situation? I mean you would have to force people to write them and monitor them, but once they've been created they pay for themselves by picking up unexpected errors.
      - mbreese 14y ago
        One of the big problems with science is the proliferation of Excel "databases". It is very easy to look at a lot of numbers and make quick calculations with them. However, when you start getting into extremely large datasets, your propensity to make mistakes increases. A2:A10 here, B3:B11 there, etc... This is one reason why recent versions of Excel warn you when your formulas aren't in sync. However, all of this is fixed when you are using SQL to properly query a database. Why? Because you are forced to write a SQL statement that details exactly what you want done. With Excel it can all be hidden away behind the cells. With SQL, it's out in front, so it's easier to check. People like to use Excel because they can get an answer quickly without all that "programming". The problems start to arise when you need better tools, but only know Excel. So, in this case, it's not a matter of a craftsman blaming their tools, it's closer to an amateur trying to pretend to be a professional. Excel is a wonderful spreadsheet. It is a horrible database.
        UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
        Unless you write SQL queries that use stored procedures or pre-calculated results tables, and then you just wind up in the same situation as Excel. I mean Excel is at its heart a query language. So your logic equally applies to Excel, why not write a massive query in Excel that does all the calculations in one go so you can see the inner workings? All you're really doing is playing musical chairs with the data. SQL query language for Excel query language, and data moved from tables to worksheets. As I said earlier, unless there are procedural changes upstream nothing will change. A tool is just a tool. You can use it in a way to minimise mistakes, or not. Humans are the weak point. Now there are tools that automatically identify common mistakes but neither Excel or SQL/relational database engines are in that class.
  - pseut 14y ago
    R&R haven't blamed excel. But I think it's fair game to criticize another workman's tool choice if it played a role in a mistake.
- inthewoods 14y ago
  It was one of many problems. The biggest problem, in my opinion, was excluding some years from their analysis without any explanation or reasoning behind why they did so. Again, peer review would have crushed this paper before it got out the door. The really amazing thing is that the authors have not retracted the study, and, last I heard, they claimed that their analysis was correct in spite of the errors and exclusion of data which did not support their thesis.
niggler 14y ago
I'm reminded of a similar situation involving treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and TurboTax. He initially blamed the software for underpayment of tax (or at least he said he used turbotax) and later admitted that he fudged the numbers. Excel is sometimes the culprit (Excel 97 bug: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25... ), but usually manual error is to blame.
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obviouslygreen 14y ago
It's easy to call Excel the cause, but it's not, any more than the existence of memory management is the cause of memory leaks. Putting a very powerful (if archaic) tool in the hands of people without the experience or understanding to use it effectively and then passing around the results for editing by other people with similarly (or differently) deficient ability with the program is the problem. The tool is simply too flexible to be used for many of the things it's doing by many of the people who are using it. This is one of the good reasons that we (application developers) do our best to gather requirements: Excel is usually good at what it does, but it does so many things that understanding what it does that you don't need it to do, or how and why it does things you've accidentally done or need to watch out for, has become as -- if not more -- important as/than understanding what it was you wanted to do in the first place. So yes... Excel plays a role in some very bad things. But no, it's not Excel's fault.
- justincormack 14y ago
  "Too flexible" sounds like someone implemented all the requirements. A programming language is too flexible too. That's not really the problem, which is more about the opaqueness and lack of DRY.
  - webmasterm 14y ago
    What's DRY?
    - omni 14y ago
      It stands for "Don't Repeat Yourself," and in its most general form refers to avoiding code duplication.
      - roblev 14y ago
        Yes indeed but the principle also applies to avoiding repetition of configuration and data.
- fafner 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
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crusso 14y ago
I'm always amazed at people for whom Excel is the hammer with which they bang on all problems. Bug tracking with Jira, Bugzilla, Mantis, or Trac? Heck no, Excel is the tool for the job!
- klodolph 14y ago
  I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project. Especially monsters like Bugzilla, which shine for huge projects but impose a lot of overhead on tiny projects.
  - mbreese 14y ago
    The trick with Excel is knowing when you've crossed that inflection point where you need something better. Unfortunately most people can't see that inflection since they only know Excel. And for others, it might be hard to transition away because they have all of their data in Excel.
  - crusso 14y ago
    Especially monsters like Bugzilla I just choked on my soda. Bugzilla packages install in a command line and you can be up and running with a product, a couple of components for categorization, and user accounts 15 minutes later. The only time I don't take that 15 minutes is if I'm working on a project where I'll NEVER be working directly with anyone else. Even then, it's often nice "just in case" someone else comes along later and wants to collaborate, you need to keep up with issues fixed in various releases, etc.
    - klodolph 14y ago
      Please update the instructions if they are wrong then: http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/installation.html http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/installation.html In particular, any piece of software that needs an MTA in order to run is not going to be pleasant when you are running a one-person project. What, are you going to want to receive email updates from yourself whenever you update a bug that you created on the computer you are using right now? I wasn't even talking about installation, however. Go to the Landfill if you don't believe me (http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ http://landfill.bugzilla.org/). You want to create a new bug? You first have to create a product, then you have to create components. You have to fill out the entire form when filing a bug, even if you only have one product, one component, and only target one operating system. Then look at a bug report. Log in to Landfill and look at a bug. Here's one: https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.cgi?id=3058 https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.c... Then think about the cost of running Bugzilla. You are now running a web server. What if you don't have a server? What if you just have a laptop for the road and a desktop at home? How are you going to do database backups? Tell me: does this beat an Excel spreadsheet for a one-person project? Edit: I'm not saying Bugzilla is bad software. I'm saying it's like a stick shift. If you put an automatic transmission in a car, you alienate users who prefer manual. If you put a manual transmission in a car, you alienate users who don't know how to use it.
crusso 14y ago
Huh, a second ago there was a comment here asking how this article was on the front page... then it was disappeared. Call Alex Jones. I wanted to voice my thought anyway... this article prominently features the information that the mainly cited study showing that national debt is bad is no longer valid. Those wanting to fight for higher debt levels are absolutely ecstatic and will up-vote any article that even tangentially mentions the Reinhart/Rogoff failure.
CatMtKing 14y ago
In bioinformatics work, Excel auto-formatting can screw up genomic data http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/ http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a... . The problem with it is that formatting will modify entered text by default, and the user has to be actively aware of this behavior to undo it. Regardless, spreadsheets are invaluable for visualizing and processing tabular data -- but default behavior and user-end awareness are the lessons here.
nhebb 14y ago
Oh yeah, if the Reinhardt-Rogoff spreadsheet had been correct all of our economic problems would be non-existent. Damn you, Excel!
Spooky23 14y ago
I got screwed again by my damn notepad. I needed a quart of buttermilk for a recipe, but wrote a pint instead on the memo pad. If only I had used a recipe management package that would have automatically told me that I wouldn't have enough buttermilk to make waffles for 5 kids.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  It would actually be pretty nice if this: 26.5 meters + 56.3 dollars failed to compile. In Scala one can certainly build this. You could certainly do it in Haskell, though it wouldn't be as nice syntactically.
  - Game_Ender 14y ago
    In C++11 that would be: 26.5_meters + 56.3_dollars
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    F# has units of measure[1], which lets you use units on numeric types. It also does unit conversion, so if you have a function (x * x), the type sig would be "x:int<m> -> int<m ^ 2>". Pretty neat. Without the neat inherent aspects, any language with lightweight support for phantom types can achieve some level of this functionality. For instance, you could define a sum type with only one case taking the type to wrap. Thus you can easily have TransactionId, AccountId, etc. as distinct types, without spending more than a line to declare them. 1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233243.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233243.aspx
  - danbruc 14y ago
    This should be easy in many languages - inherit from a numeric type or wrap one and overload the operators. This is actually not uncommon - in areas with high risk potential this is standard practice up to using different data types for x, y and z coordinates to avoid that your flight control accidentally adds wrong things together.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    There are a couple of packages in Haskell that let you do this, including unittyped[1]. It lets you write code like: *Main> 2 meter + (1 meter / second) * 5 second 7.0 m A really cute feature is that prefixes like centi and deci are functions: *Main> gallon `as` (cubic (deci meter)) 4.546089999999999 dm⋅dm⋅dm⋅# It gives you an error if the dimensions don't match, but unfortunately the error messages are hideous. Anybody can define new units just by giving a conversion factor and a string to display. These new units immediately work with other units. You can probably define new "dimensions" as well, but that's bound to be more involved. All the units are represented as empty types, so it should have no overhead at runtime. So it is very nice syntactically, with the only real problem being the error messages and the fact that it uses a whole bunch of extensions and only supports very new versions of GHC. I think it's pretty cool.
DigitalSea 14y ago
A bad mechanic will always blame his tools. Having extensively used Excel once upon a time there is nothing like it out there, period. If you want a powerful spreadsheet, Excel is your goto guy. Just because people are misusing Excel does not make it bad.
mtalantikite 14y ago
There is an error in their reporting. The paper calling Reinhart-Rogoff into question came out of UMass Amherst, not Amherst (which implies Amherst College). Very different. One is a large state school, the other an elite liberal arts school. UMass Amherst has a notoriously leftist econ program, Amherst College your typical neo-liberal.
racl101 14y ago
The program is only as good as the input it gets. Garbage in, Garbage out. Lazy and incompetent people would misuse any tool no matter how good it was.
ddfu 14y ago
Yeah, whatever. The only thing worse than Excel is the typical corporate-developed big Java application produced by a bloated team of mediocre programmers grown to further some middle manager's empire-building desire rather than to produce quality software. I'm not surprised that people doing organizationally key work give up on interfacing with little wannabe-CIOs counting subordinates and just get the work done with a spreadsheet. Not to mention Excel often ends up having better performance than most home-grown solutions, especially now its core functions are properly multithreaded.
- mbreese 14y ago
  Well, one thing the big Java apps have going for them is that they might have unit tests :)
  - yuhong 14y ago
    And more importantly it is an actual programming language unlike spreadsheet formulas.
- protomyth 14y ago
  So, an Excel to Java converter would not be on your list of to-buy items.
tptacek 14y ago
Once again: this business with Excel mistakes seems like a red herring. The bigger problem is that the Reinhart-Rogoff result never made much sense to begin with. Correlation isn't causation; in fact, there's a strong intuitive case that it's the reverse with debt and growth.
- crusso 14y ago
  Both situations are intuitive. High debt causes high servicing of debt causes inefficient use of private market resources paid in taxes. Additionally, slow growth causes lower govt revenue causes less incurring of debt to make up the shortfall in tax base. Debt and growth are both inputs and outputs that are codependent. The degree to which they impact the overall financial picture depends HEAVILY upon the opportunity cost of the servicing of the incurred debt. For bonus, consider what will happen to heavily indebted countries when interest rates begin to rise. Servicing of debt will become more difficult leading to a decrease in our ability to grow the economy, leading to more difficulty in servicing the debt, and on and on.
  - inthewoods 14y ago
    While both are possible, this article performs an interesting analysis to show why the paper likely had the causation wrong: http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogoff-and-growth-time-debt http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogo...
    - danielweber 14y ago
      The original paper doesn't make any claims about causation at all, does it? I haven't read every single word, but the Abstract certainly doesn't say that. The closest the paper says is that high debt and low growth are "associated."
- gruseom 14y ago
  Yup, but the Excel error is the soundbite. Anyone can understand it and it makes the authors look ridiculous, which is so much more potent than just being wrong, especially if what you're wrong about is something abstruse that in the end will only get reported as "economists disagree". http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ I've often wondered about this aspect of political discourse. It's not rational, it's symbolic. Yet most of the time when a symbolic soundbite takes off, even though it's wrong or misleading per se, there's still some poetic justice to it. That is, it's rare that such a soundbite is completely unfair; usually it turns out to be a metonym for an arguably legitimate criticism. This is a case of that. (I'm tempted to cite other examples, carefully balanced in partisan terms, but am scared that even that would provoke political indignation, which, to quote my son from when he was 2, "that what we not do".)
anigbrowl 14y ago
So stupid. This is like blaming math because you made an error in your arithmetic.
neilk 14y ago
I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can advise you of common problems like these already. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-errors-in-formulas-HA010066323.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-... Probably that means such an add-on would not be sellable? However it wouldn't be the first time someone paid lots of money for something that software they owned already did just fine.
- danbruc 14y ago
  There is probably not much you could check. You could probably do some type checking but beyond that I see - ad hoc - not much one could do. Excel does already catch syntax errors and a few other errors mentioned in the link. Maybe you could make these errors more prominent. But should we really encourage more development using office software? Shouldn't we solve the actual problem?
- qb45 14y ago
  The hard part would be designing a machine-readable and illiterate-writable language for formal specification of Excel spreadsheet requirements to validate against. And getting said illiterates to use it. There is no other way to detect errors involving somebody using SUM instead of AVG or aggregating data from wrong fields (examples from the article).
mjn 14y ago
An earlier discussion of role of Excel models in the financial sector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187 One interesting thing that came out of that thread was a link to this review article on spreadsheet errors: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files/Literature.pdf http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files...
- memracom 14y ago
  There is a whole organization with an annual conference for the past 10 years, that is dedicated to analyzing spreadsheet errors. http://www.eusprig.org/index.htm http://www.eusprig.org/index.htm This is a big deal. In fact, the ResolverONE spreadsheet was created as a way to reduce the risk of the kind of errors that are discussed at the EUSPRIG conferences.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Excel isn't the problem. Mediocrity is. Or, I should say, mediocrity when you need something more (like reliability, because you're making major decisions based on the data furnished). Excel is great at providing a mediocre database, presentation template, calculation engine, and model builder, all-in-one. It's even Turing complete (although it makes it hard to write decent code, since that's not the point.) It does a large number of things, and a mediocre job of all. Often, this is enough. It gets the job done for small toy problems, and often that's a start. However, basing billion-dollar decisions based on Excel code? Are you kidding me? This is exactly why I rail so hard (and without giving, ever) against Corporate injections into software. Corporate America is founded on mediocrity being good enough. Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it's fucking not. When it's not, stop using Excel as a database (it's not one) and fire all your CommodityJavaDevelopers writing SingletonVisitorFactories and start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done.
- nahname 14y ago
  Even if you are right, that pill will never be swallowed the way you are delivering it.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I'm considering starting an anti-consulting service focused on corporate culture. It's $40k for one month with a catch: after I do X amount of fieldwork and figure out all the things you're screwing up HR and culture-wise, I'd be contractually precluded from working with you in the next 5 years. Why such a restrictive and seemingly self-destructive structure? That structure means I will do something most people (who are looking to retain a long-term employment relationship) won't, and that's tell the truth. Burned Bridges Consulting, LLC.
    - jayzee 14y ago
      I really like the idea of "Burned Bridges Consulting!" There is something there...
brudgers 14y ago
Let us all stop pretending that people were pursuing austerity because of some paper by Reinhart and Rogoff. Cutting government services to citizens for the sake of repaying foreign debt has been going on as long as there has been foreign debt. And that is longer than three years. Reinhart and Rogoff were important because their idea supported an existing financial theory. If their paper had reached an opposite conclusion, there still would have been austerity. Now that their paper has been shown to be in error, there will still be austerity. And that will be because the people who benefit from it have the power to impose it. Where they don't have the power, it will not be imposed.
crazygringo 14y ago
Obviously, Excel isn't exactly at fault -- it's the people using it, as echoed by many comments here. HOWEVER, spreadsheets are rather unique in the fact that they hide the very formulas used to generate everything, unless you have a specific cell selected. So, opposite of computer programs, they're almost impossible to "read through" and verify that everything makes sense. If 99 cells have identical formulas, and 1 in the middle has a slight typo, how on earth are you ever going to see that? I wonder if there are other similar spreadsheet-like tools that one might use, that make a point of showing everything going on in the spreadsheet, rather than trying to hide it?
- adventured 14y ago
  The software should have pattern hints. If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint. And going further up the wishful thinking tree, into more difficult territory, Excel should be able to grasp what you're attempting to do by understanding, say, the top 10,000 (arbitrary number) tasks commonly performed by people using spreadsheets. That 'understanding' could then tip Excel toward deciding whether there's a problem, and whether it should leave you a nice little illuminated icon at the top right of the program with an exclamation mark. Microsoft should have insane amounts of data on everything people do with spreadsheets, and they should be able to make it radically more intelligent (without being obnoxious or intrusive - it should be optional and highly passive).
  - watershawl 14y ago
    Excel does give hints when formulas are out of pattern. It's called "Inconsistent Formula" and it's displayed with a little triangle on the box.
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint. It already does this, actually. Enter some data in two columns, like: 4 1 2 3 5 6 3 2 4 2 2 1 Then enter a sum formula in the next column like =SUM(A1:B1) and drag it all the way down. Change one in the middle to something else, like =SUM(B3:B3) instead of =SUM(A3:B3) and a little green arrow appears in the corner. Hover above it an it explains there is an "inconsistent formula".
roblev 14y ago
Excel is an incredibly powerful environment to code. I learned it many years ago; I started thinking it was some arcane tool that accountants used and ended being able to deliver amazingly powerful tools to users orders of magnitude faster than systems developers. Yes they had bugs, but... so did the industrial systems! Excel's real limitations came around scalability of developers (beyond one developer you are in a bad place) and performance that can drop of a cliff beyond a certain size. But it is an astonishingly powerful tool.
FollowSteph3 14y ago
I look at excel like a car. What's happening is that most people who use don't have a license. What's worse they've mainly learned to drive on the farm. Now rather than hire a professional or take performance driving courses they try and do the same in high end usage and things go wrong. It's not the sports car that's at fault by someone driving it at the edge of its performance without the proper skill. If the just drove it around town they'd be fine, but taking a high performance car to the track with no experience, well bad things happen. We've all seen youtube clips of high performance crashes from inexperience ;)
D9u 14y ago
Garbage in, garbage out...
mrmagooey 14y ago
When I started my thesis there was a graph passed around essentially outlining the difference between Latex and traditional word processing, and it essentially looked like http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi, with word processing packages starting off easier but exponentially getting more difficult to use and Latex being harder to start with, but easier in the long run. I feel like the same thing applies to Excel. Essentially what gets built with Excel are small programs where all the variables are unnamed, everything passed around is a numerical value and there's almost no capacity to see the entire 'program'. These always get built because Excel is easier to start with (and you can always pass an Excel spreadsheet around and let other people 'run' it), but it means in the long run with the bigger programs you hit exponential complexity pretty quickly and by then you're invested in Excel, even though R or Pandas would have been more appropriate for the size of the program. Just my two cents (coming from businesses that LOVE excel for completely insane purposes).
memracom 14y ago
The problem is people being satisfied with a free application for doing mission critical calculations. Yes, you buy an MS Office licence and Excel comes free. That is fine for run of the mill everyday calculations, but it is not OK for mission critical work and it is NOT ok for the CFO or anyone who advises the CFO on his decisions. Those important financial people should use a spreadsheet like this http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/ http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/ backed up by a team of software developers who write unit tests for the spreadsheets and validate the calculations. TLDR is that the ResolverONE spreadsheet writes Python code as you manipulate the spreadsheet. A software developer can then organize that Python code, write unit tests for the code and validate that the calculations do what the CFO intended. Once this extra work is done, then the business can have confidence in the results of the calculations. But the user interface, i.e. the spreadsheet that end users see, is the same as it was originally. This allows mission critical software development discipline to be applied to the development of spreadsheets. I suspect that the existence of a tool like ResolverONE is one of the factors that led the SEC in the USA to require Python source code for new derivatives that are created, so that there is a standard way to express the calculations of the derivative.
ww520 14y ago
Blame the tool. Yeah, very mature. Garbage in garbage out. What do you expect?
caster_cp 14y ago
And before Excel, the pencil was the root of all miscalculation evil. Damn you, pencils!
justin66 14y ago
From a recent Nassim Taleb facebook posting: "Rejecting a macroeconomic idea (Rogoff and Reinhard) over an excel error is exactly like falsifying astrology over a computer glitch."
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chenster 14y ago
Sounds more like human errors. It's just silly to blame the tool instead.
halis 14y ago
Excel is not ruining the world. If someone is stupid enough to create a sophisticated model that runs billions or even trillions of dollars in Excel then they will get what they deserve. Use a database, use Fortran, don't use Excel for that.
kfk 14y ago
People could use R or python and do similar mistakes. I am creating a small algorithm to analyze stock prices and I am just realizing how easy is to mess up in these things. Unfortunately, these things are treated like earthquakes in some countries: it's rare, we don't care. However, bad quality of reports is not rare. But the problem is: companies do not have other ways. They are stuck with the big players (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and they can't understand why their IT stack is crap. I wish from all this Excel bashing we could have a serious talk about these tools. BEFORE writing any line of code, we must first understand deeply why professionals use Excel in this way and what we can do about it. Finally, realize that the "cloud" is not considered always "safe". People put in Excel all kind of "secret" data and they are scared of having them on a third party server. Please, consider this too when thinking about a possible solution.
flatfilefan 14y ago
"A tribe of Native Americans entered the wrong row into the cell of the Excel ... Just kidding. The error was made in Lotus." - I wonder if Afrika is not making a big mistake with Ubuntu now :-)
robomartin 14y ago
Use a hammer. Hit your thumb instead of the nail. Blame the hammer. Use a table saw. Cut off three fingers instead of wood. Blame the table saw. Go scuba diving. Return to the surface too fast. Get the bends. Blame the equipment. Drive a car. Have an accident while texting. Blame the phone. Go fishing. Be careless. Put a hook through your hand. Blame the fishing rod, the reel and the hook. Use Excel. Don't make an effort to learn what you are doing. Mindlessly copy and paste. Do not seek out peer review. Cause massive financial losses. Blame Excel. Boy, do I like the sound of the word "moron".
inthewoods 14y ago
People have raised some great issues with Excel. For me, the biggest problem that I dealt with all the time when I worked on Wall Street was just the lack of one, central place for all Excel "code" - to me, it makes it exceedingly difficult to understand a spreadsheet or debug it. The "smartest" use I've seen is essentially just using Excel to store the data and then converting the "code" to VB script. Of course, one can argue at that point you might as well have the data in SQL or other database as well.
anuraj 14y ago
Excel do not seem to be the cause - poor knowledge of using the tool is. You can argue that excel needs to be simpler than it is to learn - but then until something better for ubiquitous use (not forgetting SPSS and other tools which are way more complex) comes along - excel literacy is what is needed. Excel has its own quirks, but it also is capable of doing powerful modelling if you are ready to get out of the novice levels - but you also need advanced levels mathematics and statistics knowledge to be able to use them. Programming is not a panacea - financial and statistical modelling is beyond average programmer's level of proficiency.
Confusion 14y ago
The popular Microsoft program has been implicated in the financial crisis In additional breaking news, oxygen has been implicated in the fincial crisis.

133 points by akkartik 14y ago

The problem with Reinhardt-Rogoff has nothing to do with Excel. It was a programing error that could have happened anywhere. The problem is that it took them years to reluctantly share their spreadsheet. Open data research and computation is the solution to that problem.

wyday 14y ago
Exactly. A bad workman always blames his tools.
- klodolph 14y ago
  Partly because a bad workman chooses poor tools to begin with. Tools do matter. It's easier to find a mistake in say, an SQL query or some R code than it is to find a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet, where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells.
  - niggler 14y ago
    > where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells. Excel does a pretty good job in highlighting which cells are selected when you edit a formula, and it does a pretty good job of maintaining the meaning of the formula under sheet transformations. For example, if you inserted a row between rows 8 and 9 then the two formulae would be =SUM(A3:A13) and =SUM(A3:A11) respectively. This may have been a genuine error, but the two researchers definitely started the process with a goal in mind, and when the results agreed with their goals they didn't bother to check.
    - klodolph 14y ago
      Yes, it does highlight the cells. But if a mistake does somehow make it in, it is still exceptionally tedious to find the error. It is easy enough to expand a formula for additional cells but accidentally miss a cell, leaving it with the old formula. If you were using SQL, R, or Python, this class of error would never happen.
      - niggler 14y ago
        Recent versions of excel do warn you if formulas omit adjacent cells. I agree with your sentiment to some extent but with excel 2011/2013 you have to actively suppress these warnings.
      - flatfilefan 14y ago
        I guess it is just that to do a proper audit you need to have your logic on one page. Otherwise it is extreemly hard to follow the code. In excel every formula is sitting essentially on it's own page. It is easy to code this way but hard to audit.
    - yummyfajitas 14y ago
      This may have been a genuine error, but the two researchers definitely started the process with a goal in mind... What would that goal be? According to Megan Mcardle, Rogoff was a mild proponent of stimulus. For example, he said this in 2012: "Back in 2008-9, there was a reasonable chance, maybe 20% that we’d end up in another Great Depression. Spending a trillion dollars is nothing to knock that off the table." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/17/did-reinhart-and-rogoff-flub-a-major-statistic.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/17/did-reinhar...
  - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    I'm not sure I understand why it is easier with SQL than Excel. Both seem to offer similar roadblocks and both seem to offer similar solutions. I think we're thinking there is a technological solution to a human problem, and personally I don't think there is or could ever be. This is a process problem. And by process I mean the process of building complex datasets, validating them for "correctness," and judging the quality/correctness of different data sets. Unit tests are a massive asset to programmers. I wonder if unit tests (i.e. "sanity checks") would also help in this situation? I mean you would have to force people to write them and monitor them, but once they've been created they pay for themselves by picking up unexpected errors.
    - mbreese 14y ago
      One of the big problems with science is the proliferation of Excel "databases". It is very easy to look at a lot of numbers and make quick calculations with them. However, when you start getting into extremely large datasets, your propensity to make mistakes increases. A2:A10 here, B3:B11 there, etc... This is one reason why recent versions of Excel warn you when your formulas aren't in sync. However, all of this is fixed when you are using SQL to properly query a database. Why? Because you are forced to write a SQL statement that details exactly what you want done. With Excel it can all be hidden away behind the cells. With SQL, it's out in front, so it's easier to check. People like to use Excel because they can get an answer quickly without all that "programming". The problems start to arise when you need better tools, but only know Excel. So, in this case, it's not a matter of a craftsman blaming their tools, it's closer to an amateur trying to pretend to be a professional. Excel is a wonderful spreadsheet. It is a horrible database.
      - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
        Unless you write SQL queries that use stored procedures or pre-calculated results tables, and then you just wind up in the same situation as Excel. I mean Excel is at its heart a query language. So your logic equally applies to Excel, why not write a massive query in Excel that does all the calculations in one go so you can see the inner workings? All you're really doing is playing musical chairs with the data. SQL query language for Excel query language, and data moved from tables to worksheets. As I said earlier, unless there are procedural changes upstream nothing will change. A tool is just a tool. You can use it in a way to minimise mistakes, or not. Humans are the weak point. Now there are tools that automatically identify common mistakes but neither Excel or SQL/relational database engines are in that class.
- pseut 14y ago
  R&R haven't blamed excel. But I think it's fair game to criticize another workman's tool choice if it played a role in a mistake.
inthewoods 14y ago
It was one of many problems. The biggest problem, in my opinion, was excluding some years from their analysis without any explanation or reasoning behind why they did so. Again, peer review would have crushed this paper before it got out the door. The really amazing thing is that the authors have not retracted the study, and, last I heard, they claimed that their analysis was correct in spite of the errors and exclusion of data which did not support their thesis.

niggler 14y ago

I'm reminded of a similar situation involving treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and TurboTax. He initially blamed the software for underpayment of tax (or at least he said he used turbotax) and later admitted that he fudged the numbers. Excel is sometimes the culprit (Excel 97 bug: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25... ), but usually manual error is to blame.

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obviouslygreen 14y ago

It's easy to call Excel the cause, but it's not, any more than the existence of memory management is the cause of memory leaks. Putting a very powerful (if archaic) tool in the hands of people without the experience or understanding to use it effectively and then passing around the results for editing by other people with similarly (or differently) deficient ability with the program is the problem. The tool is simply too flexible to be used for many of the things it's doing by many of the people who are using it. This is one of the good reasons that we (application developers) do our best to gather requirements: Excel is usually good at what it does, but it does so many things that understanding what it does that you don't need it to do, or how and why it does things you've accidentally done or need to watch out for, has become as -- if not more -- important as/than understanding what it was you wanted to do in the first place. So yes... Excel plays a role in some very bad things. But no, it's not Excel's fault.

justincormack 14y ago
"Too flexible" sounds like someone implemented all the requirements. A programming language is too flexible too. That's not really the problem, which is more about the opaqueness and lack of DRY.
- webmasterm 14y ago
  What's DRY?
  - omni 14y ago
    It stands for "Don't Repeat Yourself," and in its most general form refers to avoiding code duplication.
    - roblev 14y ago
      Yes indeed but the principle also applies to avoiding repetition of configuration and data.
fafner 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

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crusso 14y ago

I'm always amazed at people for whom Excel is the hammer with which they bang on all problems. Bug tracking with Jira, Bugzilla, Mantis, or Trac? Heck no, Excel is the tool for the job!

klodolph 14y ago
I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project. Especially monsters like Bugzilla, which shine for huge projects but impose a lot of overhead on tiny projects.
- mbreese 14y ago
  The trick with Excel is knowing when you've crossed that inflection point where you need something better. Unfortunately most people can't see that inflection since they only know Excel. And for others, it might be hard to transition away because they have all of their data in Excel.
- crusso 14y ago
  Especially monsters like Bugzilla I just choked on my soda. Bugzilla packages install in a command line and you can be up and running with a product, a couple of components for categorization, and user accounts 15 minutes later. The only time I don't take that 15 minutes is if I'm working on a project where I'll NEVER be working directly with anyone else. Even then, it's often nice "just in case" someone else comes along later and wants to collaborate, you need to keep up with issues fixed in various releases, etc.
  - klodolph 14y ago
    Please update the instructions if they are wrong then: http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/installation.html http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/installation.html In particular, any piece of software that needs an MTA in order to run is not going to be pleasant when you are running a one-person project. What, are you going to want to receive email updates from yourself whenever you update a bug that you created on the computer you are using right now? I wasn't even talking about installation, however. Go to the Landfill if you don't believe me (http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ http://landfill.bugzilla.org/). You want to create a new bug? You first have to create a product, then you have to create components. You have to fill out the entire form when filing a bug, even if you only have one product, one component, and only target one operating system. Then look at a bug report. Log in to Landfill and look at a bug. Here's one: https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.cgi?id=3058 https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.c... Then think about the cost of running Bugzilla. You are now running a web server. What if you don't have a server? What if you just have a laptop for the road and a desktop at home? How are you going to do database backups? Tell me: does this beat an Excel spreadsheet for a one-person project? Edit: I'm not saying Bugzilla is bad software. I'm saying it's like a stick shift. If you put an automatic transmission in a car, you alienate users who prefer manual. If you put a manual transmission in a car, you alienate users who don't know how to use it.

crusso 14y ago

Huh, a second ago there was a comment here asking how this article was on the front page... then it was disappeared. Call Alex Jones. I wanted to voice my thought anyway... this article prominently features the information that the mainly cited study showing that national debt is bad is no longer valid. Those wanting to fight for higher debt levels are absolutely ecstatic and will up-vote any article that even tangentially mentions the Reinhart/Rogoff failure.

CatMtKing 14y ago

In bioinformatics work, Excel auto-formatting can screw up genomic data http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/ http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a... . The problem with it is that formatting will modify entered text by default, and the user has to be actively aware of this behavior to undo it. Regardless, spreadsheets are invaluable for visualizing and processing tabular data -- but default behavior and user-end awareness are the lessons here.

nhebb 14y ago

Oh yeah, if the Reinhardt-Rogoff spreadsheet had been correct all of our economic problems would be non-existent. Damn you, Excel!

Spooky23 14y ago

I got screwed again by my damn notepad. I needed a quart of buttermilk for a recipe, but wrote a pint instead on the memo pad. If only I had used a recipe management package that would have automatically told me that I wouldn't have enough buttermilk to make waffles for 5 kids.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
It would actually be pretty nice if this: 26.5 meters + 56.3 dollars failed to compile. In Scala one can certainly build this. You could certainly do it in Haskell, though it wouldn't be as nice syntactically.
- Game_Ender 14y ago
  In C++11 that would be: 26.5_meters + 56.3_dollars
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  F# has units of measure[1], which lets you use units on numeric types. It also does unit conversion, so if you have a function (x * x), the type sig would be "x:int<m> -> int<m ^ 2>". Pretty neat. Without the neat inherent aspects, any language with lightweight support for phantom types can achieve some level of this functionality. For instance, you could define a sum type with only one case taking the type to wrap. Thus you can easily have TransactionId, AccountId, etc. as distinct types, without spending more than a line to declare them. 1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233243.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233243.aspx
- danbruc 14y ago
  This should be easy in many languages - inherit from a numeric type or wrap one and overload the operators. This is actually not uncommon - in areas with high risk potential this is standard practice up to using different data types for x, y and z coordinates to avoid that your flight control accidentally adds wrong things together.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  There are a couple of packages in Haskell that let you do this, including unittyped[1]. It lets you write code like: *Main> 2 meter + (1 meter / second) * 5 second 7.0 m A really cute feature is that prefixes like centi and deci are functions: *Main> gallon `as` (cubic (deci meter)) 4.546089999999999 dm⋅dm⋅dm⋅# It gives you an error if the dimensions don't match, but unfortunately the error messages are hideous. Anybody can define new units just by giving a conversion factor and a string to display. These new units immediately work with other units. You can probably define new "dimensions" as well, but that's bound to be more involved. All the units are represented as empty types, so it should have no overhead at runtime. So it is very nice syntactically, with the only real problem being the error messages and the fact that it uses a whole bunch of extensions and only supports very new versions of GHC. I think it's pretty cool.

DigitalSea 14y ago

A bad mechanic will always blame his tools. Having extensively used Excel once upon a time there is nothing like it out there, period. If you want a powerful spreadsheet, Excel is your goto guy. Just because people are misusing Excel does not make it bad.

mtalantikite 14y ago

There is an error in their reporting. The paper calling Reinhart-Rogoff into question came out of UMass Amherst, not Amherst (which implies Amherst College). Very different. One is a large state school, the other an elite liberal arts school. UMass Amherst has a notoriously leftist econ program, Amherst College your typical neo-liberal.

racl101 14y ago

The program is only as good as the input it gets. Garbage in, Garbage out. Lazy and incompetent people would misuse any tool no matter how good it was.

ddfu 14y ago

Yeah, whatever. The only thing worse than Excel is the typical corporate-developed big Java application produced by a bloated team of mediocre programmers grown to further some middle manager's empire-building desire rather than to produce quality software. I'm not surprised that people doing organizationally key work give up on interfacing with little wannabe-CIOs counting subordinates and just get the work done with a spreadsheet. Not to mention Excel often ends up having better performance than most home-grown solutions, especially now its core functions are properly multithreaded.

mbreese 14y ago
Well, one thing the big Java apps have going for them is that they might have unit tests :)
- yuhong 14y ago
  And more importantly it is an actual programming language unlike spreadsheet formulas.
protomyth 14y ago
So, an Excel to Java converter would not be on your list of to-buy items.

tptacek 14y ago

Once again: this business with Excel mistakes seems like a red herring. The bigger problem is that the Reinhart-Rogoff result never made much sense to begin with. Correlation isn't causation; in fact, there's a strong intuitive case that it's the reverse with debt and growth.

crusso 14y ago
Both situations are intuitive. High debt causes high servicing of debt causes inefficient use of private market resources paid in taxes. Additionally, slow growth causes lower govt revenue causes less incurring of debt to make up the shortfall in tax base. Debt and growth are both inputs and outputs that are codependent. The degree to which they impact the overall financial picture depends HEAVILY upon the opportunity cost of the servicing of the incurred debt. For bonus, consider what will happen to heavily indebted countries when interest rates begin to rise. Servicing of debt will become more difficult leading to a decrease in our ability to grow the economy, leading to more difficulty in servicing the debt, and on and on.
- inthewoods 14y ago
  While both are possible, this article performs an interesting analysis to show why the paper likely had the causation wrong: http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogoff-and-growth-time-debt http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post-reinhartrogo...
  - danielweber 14y ago
    The original paper doesn't make any claims about causation at all, does it? I haven't read every single word, but the Abstract certainly doesn't say that. The closest the paper says is that high debt and low growth are "associated."
gruseom 14y ago
Yup, but the Excel error is the soundbite. Anyone can understand it and it makes the authors look ridiculous, which is so much more potent than just being wrong, especially if what you're wrong about is something abstruse that in the end will only get reported as "economists disagree". http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ I've often wondered about this aspect of political discourse. It's not rational, it's symbolic. Yet most of the time when a symbolic soundbite takes off, even though it's wrong or misleading per se, there's still some poetic justice to it. That is, it's rare that such a soundbite is completely unfair; usually it turns out to be a metonym for an arguably legitimate criticism. This is a case of that. (I'm tempted to cite other examples, carefully balanced in partisan terms, but am scared that even that would provoke political indignation, which, to quote my son from when he was 2, "that what we not do".)

anigbrowl 14y ago

So stupid. This is like blaming math because you made an error in your arithmetic.

neilk 14y ago

I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can advise you of common problems like these already. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-errors-in-formulas-HA010066323.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common-... Probably that means such an add-on would not be sellable? However it wouldn't be the first time someone paid lots of money for something that software they owned already did just fine.

danbruc 14y ago
There is probably not much you could check. You could probably do some type checking but beyond that I see - ad hoc - not much one could do. Excel does already catch syntax errors and a few other errors mentioned in the link. Maybe you could make these errors more prominent. But should we really encourage more development using office software? Shouldn't we solve the actual problem?
qb45 14y ago
The hard part would be designing a machine-readable and illiterate-writable language for formal specification of Excel spreadsheet requirements to validate against. And getting said illiterates to use it. There is no other way to detect errors involving somebody using SUM instead of AVG or aggregating data from wrong fields (examples from the article).

mjn 14y ago

An earlier discussion of role of Excel models in the financial sector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187 One interesting thing that came out of that thread was a link to this review article on spreadsheet errors: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files/Literature.pdf http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files...

memracom 14y ago
There is a whole organization with an annual conference for the past 10 years, that is dedicated to analyzing spreadsheet errors. http://www.eusprig.org/index.htm http://www.eusprig.org/index.htm This is a big deal. In fact, the ResolverONE spreadsheet was created as a way to reduce the risk of the kind of errors that are discussed at the EUSPRIG conferences.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Excel isn't the problem. Mediocrity is. Or, I should say, mediocrity when you need something more (like reliability, because you're making major decisions based on the data furnished). Excel is great at providing a mediocre database, presentation template, calculation engine, and model builder, all-in-one. It's even Turing complete (although it makes it hard to write decent code, since that's not the point.) It does a large number of things, and a mediocre job of all. Often, this is enough. It gets the job done for small toy problems, and often that's a start. However, basing billion-dollar decisions based on Excel code? Are you kidding me? This is exactly why I rail so hard (and without giving, ever) against Corporate injections into software. Corporate America is founded on mediocrity being good enough. Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it's fucking not. When it's not, stop using Excel as a database (it's not one) and fire all your CommodityJavaDevelopers writing SingletonVisitorFactories and start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done.

nahname 14y ago
Even if you are right, that pill will never be swallowed the way you are delivering it.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I'm considering starting an anti-consulting service focused on corporate culture. It's $40k for one month with a catch: after I do X amount of fieldwork and figure out all the things you're screwing up HR and culture-wise, I'd be contractually precluded from working with you in the next 5 years. Why such a restrictive and seemingly self-destructive structure? That structure means I will do something most people (who are looking to retain a long-term employment relationship) won't, and that's tell the truth. Burned Bridges Consulting, LLC.
  - jayzee 14y ago
    I really like the idea of "Burned Bridges Consulting!" There is something there...

brudgers 14y ago

Let us all stop pretending that people were pursuing austerity because of some paper by Reinhart and Rogoff. Cutting government services to citizens for the sake of repaying foreign debt has been going on as long as there has been foreign debt. And that is longer than three years. Reinhart and Rogoff were important because their idea supported an existing financial theory. If their paper had reached an opposite conclusion, there still would have been austerity. Now that their paper has been shown to be in error, there will still be austerity. And that will be because the people who benefit from it have the power to impose it. Where they don't have the power, it will not be imposed.

crazygringo 14y ago

Obviously, Excel isn't exactly at fault -- it's the people using it, as echoed by many comments here. HOWEVER, spreadsheets are rather unique in the fact that they hide the very formulas used to generate everything, unless you have a specific cell selected. So, opposite of computer programs, they're almost impossible to "read through" and verify that everything makes sense. If 99 cells have identical formulas, and 1 in the middle has a slight typo, how on earth are you ever going to see that? I wonder if there are other similar spreadsheet-like tools that one might use, that make a point of showing everything going on in the spreadsheet, rather than trying to hide it?

adventured 14y ago
The software should have pattern hints. If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint. And going further up the wishful thinking tree, into more difficult territory, Excel should be able to grasp what you're attempting to do by understanding, say, the top 10,000 (arbitrary number) tasks commonly performed by people using spreadsheets. That 'understanding' could then tip Excel toward deciding whether there's a problem, and whether it should leave you a nice little illuminated icon at the top right of the program with an exclamation mark. Microsoft should have insane amounts of data on everything people do with spreadsheets, and they should be able to make it radically more intelligent (without being obnoxious or intrusive - it should be optional and highly passive).
- watershawl 14y ago
  Excel does give hints when formulas are out of pattern. It's called "Inconsistent Formula" and it's displayed with a little triangle on the box.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint. It already does this, actually. Enter some data in two columns, like: 4 1 2 3 5 6 3 2 4 2 2 1 Then enter a sum formula in the next column like =SUM(A1:B1) and drag it all the way down. Change one in the middle to something else, like =SUM(B3:B3) instead of =SUM(A3:B3) and a little green arrow appears in the corner. Hover above it an it explains there is an "inconsistent formula".

roblev 14y ago

Excel is an incredibly powerful environment to code. I learned it many years ago; I started thinking it was some arcane tool that accountants used and ended being able to deliver amazingly powerful tools to users orders of magnitude faster than systems developers. Yes they had bugs, but... so did the industrial systems! Excel's real limitations came around scalability of developers (beyond one developer you are in a bad place) and performance that can drop of a cliff beyond a certain size. But it is an astonishingly powerful tool.

FollowSteph3 14y ago

I look at excel like a car. What's happening is that most people who use don't have a license. What's worse they've mainly learned to drive on the farm. Now rather than hire a professional or take performance driving courses they try and do the same in high end usage and things go wrong. It's not the sports car that's at fault by someone driving it at the edge of its performance without the proper skill. If the just drove it around town they'd be fine, but taking a high performance car to the track with no experience, well bad things happen. We've all seen youtube clips of high performance crashes from inexperience ;)

D9u 14y ago

Garbage in, garbage out...

mrmagooey 14y ago

When I started my thesis there was a graph passed around essentially outlining the difference between Latex and traditional word processing, and it essentially looked like http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi, with word processing packages starting off easier but exponentially getting more difficult to use and Latex being harder to start with, but easier in the long run. I feel like the same thing applies to Excel. Essentially what gets built with Excel are small programs where all the variables are unnamed, everything passed around is a numerical value and there's almost no capacity to see the entire 'program'. These always get built because Excel is easier to start with (and you can always pass an Excel spreadsheet around and let other people 'run' it), but it means in the long run with the bigger programs you hit exponential complexity pretty quickly and by then you're invested in Excel, even though R or Pandas would have been more appropriate for the size of the program. Just my two cents (coming from businesses that LOVE excel for completely insane purposes).

memracom 14y ago

The problem is people being satisfied with a free application for doing mission critical calculations. Yes, you buy an MS Office licence and Excel comes free. That is fine for run of the mill everyday calculations, but it is not OK for mission critical work and it is NOT ok for the CFO or anyone who advises the CFO on his decisions. Those important financial people should use a spreadsheet like this http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/ http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/ backed up by a team of software developers who write unit tests for the spreadsheets and validate the calculations. TLDR is that the ResolverONE spreadsheet writes Python code as you manipulate the spreadsheet. A software developer can then organize that Python code, write unit tests for the code and validate that the calculations do what the CFO intended. Once this extra work is done, then the business can have confidence in the results of the calculations. But the user interface, i.e. the spreadsheet that end users see, is the same as it was originally. This allows mission critical software development discipline to be applied to the development of spreadsheets. I suspect that the existence of a tool like ResolverONE is one of the factors that led the SEC in the USA to require Python source code for new derivatives that are created, so that there is a standard way to express the calculations of the derivative.

ww520 14y ago

Blame the tool. Yeah, very mature. Garbage in garbage out. What do you expect?

caster_cp 14y ago

And before Excel, the pencil was the root of all miscalculation evil. Damn you, pencils!

justin66 14y ago

From a recent Nassim Taleb facebook posting: "Rejecting a macroeconomic idea (Rogoff and Reinhard) over an excel error is exactly like falsifying astrology over a computer glitch."

deleted 14y ago

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chenster 14y ago

Sounds more like human errors. It's just silly to blame the tool instead.

halis 14y ago

Excel is not ruining the world. If someone is stupid enough to create a sophisticated model that runs billions or even trillions of dollars in Excel then they will get what they deserve. Use a database, use Fortran, don't use Excel for that.

kfk 14y ago

People could use R or python and do similar mistakes. I am creating a small algorithm to analyze stock prices and I am just realizing how easy is to mess up in these things. Unfortunately, these things are treated like earthquakes in some countries: it's rare, we don't care. However, bad quality of reports is not rare. But the problem is: companies do not have other ways. They are stuck with the big players (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and they can't understand why their IT stack is crap. I wish from all this Excel bashing we could have a serious talk about these tools. BEFORE writing any line of code, we must first understand deeply why professionals use Excel in this way and what we can do about it. Finally, realize that the "cloud" is not considered always "safe". People put in Excel all kind of "secret" data and they are scared of having them on a third party server. Please, consider this too when thinking about a possible solution.

flatfilefan 14y ago

"A tribe of Native Americans entered the wrong row into the cell of the Excel ... Just kidding. The error was made in Lotus." - I wonder if Afrika is not making a big mistake with Ubuntu now :-)

robomartin 14y ago

Use a hammer. Hit your thumb instead of the nail. Blame the hammer. Use a table saw. Cut off three fingers instead of wood. Blame the table saw. Go scuba diving. Return to the surface too fast. Get the bends. Blame the equipment. Drive a car. Have an accident while texting. Blame the phone. Go fishing. Be careless. Put a hook through your hand. Blame the fishing rod, the reel and the hook. Use Excel. Don't make an effort to learn what you are doing. Mindlessly copy and paste. Do not seek out peer review. Cause massive financial losses. Blame Excel. Boy, do I like the sound of the word "moron".

inthewoods 14y ago

People have raised some great issues with Excel. For me, the biggest problem that I dealt with all the time when I worked on Wall Street was just the lack of one, central place for all Excel "code" - to me, it makes it exceedingly difficult to understand a spreadsheet or debug it. The "smartest" use I've seen is essentially just using Excel to store the data and then converting the "code" to VB script. Of course, one can argue at that point you might as well have the data in SQL or other database as well.

anuraj 14y ago

Excel do not seem to be the cause - poor knowledge of using the tool is. You can argue that excel needs to be simpler than it is to learn - but then until something better for ubiquitous use (not forgetting SPSS and other tools which are way more complex) comes along - excel literacy is what is needed. Excel has its own quirks, but it also is capable of doing powerful modelling if you are ready to get out of the novice levels - but you also need advanced levels mathematics and statistics knowledge to be able to use them. Programming is not a panacea - financial and statistical modelling is beyond average programmer's level of proficiency.

Confusion 14y ago

The popular Microsoft program has been implicated in the financial crisis In additional breaking news, oxygen has been implicated in the fincial crisis.