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Excel can be an excellent tool - I think the problem is in creating something that buries key calculations or is heavily prone to human error so major mistakes

Excel can be an excellent tool - I think the problem is in creating something that buries key calculations or is heavily prone to human error so major mistakes are made. Some of these things (recently reported in the news) move markets and made / lost billions. You should definitely check your math! Tableau is great for visualizations but if you want to do anything on your own servers it is prohibitively expensive and there are other alternatives out there. Not sure it provides the same capability as Excel for analysis.

chadgeidel 13y ago
This is my biggest gripe. There have been several well-publicised studies where calculations were in error. 88% Of excel spreadsheets have errors - I couldn't find the actual study after a quick googling. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-err... Recent national debt study found to contain erroneous calculations; http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-rep...
- simonh 13y ago
  The finance industry definitely has love hate relationship with Excel. We're trying to encourage moving Excel style analysis into Python and have developed a library specifically to facilitate that, meanwhile we make sure our application platforms have first class Excel integration and export functionality. To my mind the key point in the article is lack of facilities for code review of Excel spreadsheets. Yes there are tools to help with that, but they're not widely used. If our developers routinely pushed their development code directly to production without proper review and testing, someone (probably several people) would get fired on the spot, yet important business decisions get made based on unreviewed Excel spreadsheets all the time.
- lucozade 13y ago
  If 88% of spreadsheets have errors, what's the likelihood that the figure of 88% is correct?
  - peatmoss 13y ago
    That figure was calculated using R.

chadgeidel 13y ago

This is my biggest gripe. There have been several well-publicised studies where calculations were in error. 88% Of excel spreadsheets have errors - I couldn't find the actual study after a quick googling. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-err... Recent national debt study found to contain erroneous calculations; http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-rep...

simonh 13y ago
The finance industry definitely has love hate relationship with Excel. We're trying to encourage moving Excel style analysis into Python and have developed a library specifically to facilitate that, meanwhile we make sure our application platforms have first class Excel integration and export functionality. To my mind the key point in the article is lack of facilities for code review of Excel spreadsheets. Yes there are tools to help with that, but they're not widely used. If our developers routinely pushed their development code directly to production without proper review and testing, someone (probably several people) would get fired on the spot, yet important business decisions get made based on unreviewed Excel spreadsheets all the time.
lucozade 13y ago
If 88% of spreadsheets have errors, what's the likelihood that the figure of 88% is correct?
- peatmoss 13y ago
  That figure was calculated using R.