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>The worst I have seen was a team of several hundred people who, on $200 half-broken laptops, were running - in parallel - 500MB Excel files for hours every day
by Nicholas_C 11y ago
>The worst I have seen was a team of several hundred people who, on $200 half-broken laptops, were running - in parallel - 500MB Excel files for hours every day, which basically did a few linear operations on about 30 variables, before joining the results in a superfile itself taking up to 20 minutes just to open on a gaming-specced desktop.
This is my nightmare. I work on a sharedrive with large Excel files that conk out Excel. We are working on building a tool to do this work but it is slow going.
- jfjeschke 11y agoWhat does the tool do exactly?
- Nicholas_C 11y agoIt's a custom developed planning/forecasting tool. It's a P x Q thing, but the P and Q are variable as to the type and mix of the Ps and Qs and need to be combined/sliced into many different ways for analysis/planning/forecasting. The team actually developing it has been very challenged.
- crdb 11y agoYou're not really challenged until the growth rate of their Excel monster outpaces the rate at which you automate the existing stuff... thankfully Excel has a 1 million row limit, and it always takes them time to figure out how to shard an Excel database :P
- Nicholas_C 11y agoWell in this case it's actually mine and the rest of the finance group's Excel monsters (plural) that are being automated. The devs are doing yeoman's work.
- crdb 11y agoI'm sure there's automated ways of doing it within the Microsoft ecosystem... it's just not a specialty I want to acquire!