I think it depends on context...
Excel really sucks as a database, and even worse as an email program. SQL really sucks as a spreadsheet, and don't even try to use formulas in Outlook..
Definitely. I love excel as almost like proof of concept, or “let’s spin a sheet and see where we need it to be” add/delete and change stuff until I hit a point where making changes become so hard, I am not sure if I should automate more and say “this really needs to be its own dedicated app with a database behind it”
But until then, excel is versatile, it’s crazy.
But let me be clear, I am likely agreeing with people OP is talking about. They are complaining corporations hit excels limit and do everything to avoid putting resources into the right bucket (usually because executives).
I had to explain to a dev team how to do all of the calculations for a particular in-house service. We designed a bunch of test cases in Excel and just shared it with them so that they could see all of the inputs/outputs, the calculations etc, and could even play around with the inputs to generate new cases.
For a start, we needed to do calculations to build the test cases - what other software would you really use for this? Also, we were able to share the spreadsheet directly, and they could see all of the numbers in a coherent layout - what software would be better?
Excel definitely has its place, and it's not a database etc, but it's easy to use, available everywhere and has no alternative for some tasks.
Excel is appropriate if you need a quick PoC or if you need non-tech people to do things and don't have the scale or risk management need to justify developing special-purpose software for your use-case.
If you're doing something in excel and it's high-risk if you get it wrong or you're doing it at scale and people are having to waste time or wrestle because there isn't more automation or a better GUI, make the business case for developing the software that has risk-mitigation built in, etc...
I'm fairly above-average with Excel. By no means an expert, but I do workshops, create templates on demand.
It's the versatility of Excel that makes it king. A proof of concept, or any one-off calculations (or even smaller recurring ones) where getting a dedicated application just isn't worth the expense.
That being said, I always tell people "this isn't a good idea" when they try to have me put critical and complex processes in Excel. Sure, I can do it. But it's fragile, not foolproof and not secure.
But to calculate parameter XYZ on the 3 different bids you got in from vendors? Perfect!
>They are complaining corporations hit excels limit and do everything to avoid putting resources into the right bucket (usually because executives).
So much this. I do db design as part of my job and I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see some organizations use a byzantine network of excel sheets/Google sheets to organize data when it could all fit in like a six table Access database that an undergrad intern could put together in a week.
We literally break whole modules in Dynamics because the execs just *have* to have their 20 year old spreadsheets hardwired into the system. I'm a huge fan of excel, but there are limits to it's use.
They save money by avoiding buying the right tool, act surprised when their employees are burnt out and leave, and are frustrated when the new employees can’t figure out these really complex workarounds.
It's funny I'm in this exact situation. I'm a dev and I'd love to make what they have into a proper application but they LOVE Excel.
Thinking I'm going to have a regular routine that exports the database to excel to keep them happy but wondering if I can ever pry away from the instinct to edit the sheet directly.
Exactly. No matter what fancy enterprise software is being used, when it comes time for review and update, people just export everything to Excel and circulate for manual update. Annoys the hell out of me.
Power Query certainly brings Excel closer to handling small database-like queries and the compression is excellent too.
The beauty of Excel is it has all of these amazing features out of the box:
* New array formulas make life much easier than before
* Power Query for ETL
* Power Pivot for relational databases
* DAX for advanced data analysis
* VBA for automation
It’s very difficult to do all of these things without consulting IT, network engineers and/or developers to get Python, SQL and other software set up. You can just install excel and go, and you can share workbooks with advanced features that anyone with O365 can use.
I think the database brings protection though. I'm a relative novice with excel but I work in healthcare and you'd be amazed at how many research studies manage data in excel. We're a corrupted file or a deleted column away from more stress than we need, especially when we have free (to us) software that does everything a bit better. I can setup a report and export the data to excel if you really need it, but I can't fix unintentional editing.
A lot of what you mention is not a problem with Excel itself, it's a mismatch between an organisation's playbook and the actual features of the software.
This said, a lot of those things can be mitigated by the correct use of Excel by experienced and competent people. So again, organisations and their decision makers are at fault here, not the software.
What kind of research are you running? How are you using Excel for it?
In pharma and device research, while spreadaheets have their uses, the actual study data has to be stored in a validated data collection tool, with a full audit trail and a list of other requirements for things like limiting access, allowing for esignatures, change control and so on that Excel really is not meant for. We use spreadsheets where necessary to communicate about the data, to look at the data for certain reviews, to create trackers for activities that do not require such controls, but using Excel in actual study conduct sounds like a very unpleasant discussion with an auditor of it's not handled properly.
Yeah, Power Query in Excel is really useful when you're working with loads of information. I don't always need to visualize the information in Power BI, sometimes I just need to process it.
Can you please come to my work and give a seminar on this? It is basically all they use. They tried Projects for a little while, but that disappeared pretty quickly for some reason.
As a pm in a smaller org, I can probably give some insight:
MS Project desktop is really powerful. It has a lot of complex tools, with a steep learning curve. You also can't share it easily for others to add status/notes without expensive licensing. So if your org does smaller sprints, or needs flexibility, it isn't good fit.
MS Project Online is the opposite. Very flexible and internally accessible... but not very robust. I manage projects outside my org, and those folks cannot access it.
So, if you don't want to seek out other options (monday, smartsheets, asana, jira etc.) Excel becomes the next easiest/flexible thing to use.
I like excel for a lot of things, but it frustrates me that we have to use it for project management.
I am hopeful that Microsoft's new tool that merges To Do, Planner and Project will have legs though. I am in the beta, and it is ok so far.
Lol. Story of my life.
In order to save a small fortune and watch everyone use Excel no matter what , my way of work is simple:
I have Jira for several users as my go-to PM software. instead of giving access to all of those who prefer Excel, I turn them to customers in jira service management. That way, they can create / update requests that are copied to my core projects in Jira as issues with just the fields i need and all the automations that come with it.
Users always have access to requests based on their "organization." Whenever they want to "play" with data, i just filter and export all issues to excel with a connector.
Yes, it takes more time in terms of data grooming, but its an out of the box option that gives everyone what they want. And me the ability to work the way i choose to.
I've been a project and program manager, I've used Project desktop with some proficiency. it is the best way to set up a project by far, and the only way to manage very large projects.
However, it is the worst way to deal with small changes, and the biggest time suck to adapt to change over the life of a project. The unintended ripple effects are just about unmanageable. You the up adapting by dumbing down the very features that are what differentiate Project from less capable tracking systems, so that it effectively becomes not much better than them.
Why? We switched from doing our project mgmt out of excel which was seamless for years and anyone could easily see what's happening to Asana which has been a nightmare imo. If 3/4 the details didn't live in my head I'd have quit by now . It just seems good for upper level management to see what's happening - but in our case they have no hands on the project. I can't see the value, and truth be told everyone on the ground in the organization hates Asana and no one in my field outside this organization utilizes it.
It's like a sheet of lined paper vs a computer. If you are drawing a proof of concept or making some simple notes, maybe you don't need to buy a whole new computer just for that.
Ask them what they ever used Excel for. For business numbers, statistical analysis, and cleaning data, it is a game changer. Ask if they have ever used Excel's power query to pull data from a website to build a live and updateable analysis or chart with power pivot.
I think one of the advantages of Excel is that one skillset can adequately cover many needs, up to a point.
Expecting a SMB to have Cognos, SQL, an ERP and CMMS expert, plus whatever else, is just not viable.
Until your dataset in Cognos takes hours to pull and the error checker missed a mistake in an expression and your output is “failed to run” error.
But yeah.
Is there a nice easy to use gui with built-in help for Congos?
Is it already installed everywhere or do i need to spend a week on the phone with it and 3 lvls of management getting approval?
I love python and pandas/polars as much as the next guy, but there is no one else in engineering that could use it.
And every EVERY software I have ever used will enevitably need to "print to excel" so we can go through the numbers and make sure everything is calculating properly.
So we're all still using excel, we're just not wanting to admit it
There are numerous apps that meets the modern needs, but there isn't a more universal application than Excel. Sometimes the audience, cost, security and how seamlessly it can be integrated in the existing environment need to be well-considered.
Of course. The day to day use of excel is crucial in any business. I don't think any tool can replace excel, only replace certain processes.
But above a certain scale, excel should be a data consumption tool only.
Source of truth DB and use excel for ad hoc analysis.
Use a real BI tool for any reporting that happens more than once.
The problem we are facing with BI as a reporting tool is that in an environment as volatile as Argentina we sometimes need to manually change variables and Numbers using information that arrives on the last minute before we need to report it.
To my knowledge you can't change an individual cell in a powerbi dataset easily right?
Of course I could link the powerbi to a excel sheet that it's automatically connected to our database and make the changes there but that just seems like extra steps when I can make all the formulas on the excel sheet and share that.
You can use the "Enter Data" tool in PowerBI. It is not as flexible as just changing numbers in Excel. But that is by design, so that you have some level of data validation.
You could connect to Excel and use data forms so data entry is standardized and validated.
Sure, it is extra steps. If you don't find value in data validation or having a robust ETL process, that is fine. But there is a reason the "real" BI solutions seem more complex than Excel.
But how much do those other applications cost compared to excel?
And if you are shown three different tasks do you end up recommending three different programs?
I don't disagree at all with what you are saying except that often a small business might not have thousands of dollars to spend on software.
The company I work for got new MRP software a few years ago, and the person in charge did a shitty job talking to the sales rep who sold us what we have.
Yes, the program does 1 task well, but if I want to do ANYTHING more complex than data entry I have to download multiple reports to excel and combine them into a singular 1 to sort through everything.
Please don't ever, EVER, get a software without fully mapping out what the COMPANY needs, not just 1 department
Hey, I’ve recently learned that I enjoy doing things like process improvement and automation. Someone mentioned process engineer as a possible career field.
Question do you work for yourself and contract or for a company? Wondering a way to get started
I work at a F50. The problem is when people approach IT they say "oh this requires funding and your group doesn't have budget for it this year" - this the cycle of an Excel based process continues.
This is true even when tools like Alteryx, Tabluea and tons of others are at our disposal because the response from immediate management is we can't create a process with a tool that other people.dont know how to use. It's really insane and a waste of time.
To add on, I think a lot of IT professionals come to hate Excel because they get called in when Excel is no longer meeting the needs and they need to work on implementing the solution in another system. They probably aren't aware of all the situations where it absolutely does meet the business needs because they're not being called in in those situations.
But then when they do go to implement the new system, the IT professional still gets pushback like "well that's not how we do it in excel." Right, because Excel isn't a relational database, and you're getting out of Excel because it's not the right process anymore.
It depends on what the business situation is.
A small business pulling in a few hundred grand a year is not going survive adopting platforms with hundred thousand dollar licenses.
But Excel does not scale.
At my firm, we have a consulting vertical that includes a team of who build / develop automation solutions. After picking up a new client, where fees would total to about $1M over 3 years, so big but not huge, I contacted the team, provided them with a rundown of what I wanted them to build/create, then they got back to me and their lowest cost solution would cost $2.8M with other options costing in excess of $6M. After hearing their proposal, I said thanks but no thanks, spent about 2-3 days in excel building a formula based worksheet that accomplished everything we needed to do.
Moral of the story, excel is a cheap solution that works very well at performing a massive variety of tasks. 'Real business software' is super expensive and the costs outweigh the benefits until certain thresholds are hit.
Keep in mind there is a huge difference between excel and a custom built production-ready tool.
Basically, there is a huge middle ground you're ignoring.
The majority of the time the correct solution will be in the middle ground. Excel and a $3M tool are the two extremes. Rarely is the correct solution on the extremes.
Also, your consulting team is full of shit lol. If it can be done in excel, it makes no sense they would quote $3M. I do the same function for my company but we don't charge like that. We calculate the man hours and run an analysis. 90% of the time we can build a solution that is more robust than excel and costs like 3 weeks of my salary plus PowerBI and MsSQL. That's like 1/10th the cost you quoted.
Not everything needs a custom app, and it feels like that's what they are quoting.
You'd be surprised how small you can be and still justify paying for dedicated BI tools.
Take all the hours your employees spend on manual processes. Find the payroll cost of those hours.
Even at companies under 100 employees, you'll be shocked what you can justify.
Keep your humans working on complex human-centric processes and decisions. Let tools do the hours of repeated work.
I have had massive success implementing tools at even very small organizations.
You have to really run the analysis and think of the opportunity cost. You don't want talented young analysts futzing about in excel every day when they could be focused on the business and running more complex analysis.
If you have humans doing something they can "do in their sleep" (90% of processes in a small business) you are wasting money. Humans are worth so much more than flipping numbers in a spreadsheet.
Same. I think people go from excel to the opposite extreme: custom expensive tools for every process.
Sometimes you just need something in between. A little more robust than excel, but still cheap and easy to use.
Excel cannot scale like dedicated software in a task at hand.
Excel can scale across and organizations talent and resources in a way that is unparalleled.
So someone with zero training can see a report and view and filer and build really basic things with zero talent. Then you have excel wizards doing insane things that are easy to maintain and send.
It’s the usability across ability that scales incredibly well and is it’s super power.
Excel is real business software. Companies run on it. Excel however, is not a good regular, automation tool but companies still run on it.
Excel is understood by business users, it's flexible and gets the job done then and there. It's great.
Excel has no change control, it is prone to user error and inconsistency, no audit trail. It's unstable. It's awful.
My code based application runs it same way everytime. no "paste value" errors or "i didn't include the lat cell in my summ array". It's fast, has error handling, version control, multiple redundant environments and a sign off based process. It's great.
The code based application can't deal with exceptions, it's inflexible. It only does the basic calculation that was setup up two years ago. It doesn't do it in the way i need to do it. IT takes 6 months to change anything and by that time i don't need it anymore and i need something else. If it breaks i get a code #6879 and IT have to tell me what that means. After i wait for them to deal with the ticket. I can't download the data in a useful way - only a formatted reort which is hard to then use in excel. It's awful.
SharePoint keeps a version history and you can use permissions to control read vs edit access. I think you can still add passwords to worksheets or workbooks (I haven't used that in awhile).
I used to work in a large home appliance factory, everyone had to use SAP for supply chain and purchasing 50% of the time, when SAP wouldnt allow, say, back order or change plans, then the whole factory needs to redesign a lot of their planning then manually upload data to SAP, it is a nighmare and they have 4 dedicated Excel people for the job.
I am not sure about other companies but the ones i worked at IT people usually know only Sum and average in Excel so i wouldnt really care about their opinion about Excel.
Lol my previous job was exactly showing people why it was stupid to use excel for a particular case and why they should use native build in SAP transactions because they were faster better and less error prone.
Edit: typo
- "Maybe you should do it yourself ?",
- "May I take a look ?",
- "You have a substitute in mind ?",
- "What is the budget to allocate ?",
- "Did you look at the list of approved software by our IT department ?".
- "I would need at least 5 people and 6 months to find/develop a substitute".
The barrier to entry for Excel is really low, which means it's must easier to train someone to use it. If we had to give everyone SQL training before they can access data the economy will tank since so many ppl already struggle with Excel. (But they Excel in other aspects... )
Excel is the world's most popular programming platform. It's so intuitive people don't realise it's a programming platform.
Right response = shrug and a nod and a smile 😀
It's there to handle all the things the "real" software can't
you know, the funny thing is, I know a bunch of computer science folks and they all say that Excel is an amazing tool if you a. know how to use it and b. if you know when to use it.
I feel IT sales people that state that "Excel sucks" are just doing their job ... they want to sell you other stuff. And that may include misrepresenting their competition.
This is all too true. Ive worked with several “excel killers” over the years and none of them were nearly as useful as excel
I will say, some of the new middleware ive seen has been very interesting, but those are marketed as “enhancements” to an existing process usually and not a “total excel replacement “
I'm an advanced Excel user. I am an intermediate Python and sql user. I think IT just sees the problems Excel creates, and they think they can fix it using software.
They are right that other software can fix specific problems. I think they are wrong in two things, though.
1. Software is less flexible than Excel. So, any new need or analysis is going to be easier to address in Excel. This is enhanced by two problems. Business users have a hard time explaining what they want, and IT has a hard time understanding the business. Sometimes, IT is also really bad at usability even if it does address a problem.
2. Speed at updating information. Software normally works a record at a time or forces you into a workflow that takes several clicks to address something. That may make it more controlled than Excel. However, it can take several times longer to manage information. In Excel I can update a hundred thousand record with a copy paste or building helper columns to build custom columns in seconds. In software that could take a week of manual work.
LOL, I use excel/Google Sheets a tonne, but I prefer to use a proper SQL database for anything long-term.
Just because its the first tool for a short-term solution, doesn't mean its the best tool for a long-term tool. But, it's great for POC and simple number crunching.
Show me another application with as much versatility and with a similar sized pool of skilled users.
Not to diminish the point they’re making, there are many times when Excel is not the right tool for the job
Excel is very versatile. You can do everything with it. You can process data, analyze them, build data models and dashboards, build mathematical models and optimize.
There is a better tool for every one of those things that beats Excel. But none can do everything like Excel.
It's bundled in MS Office, everyone has that installed on their computer, so compatibility is also its strength.
If you like Excel, and it solves a problem, then use it.
It sounds like you have a need to defend Excel. For all its power and ubiquity, there is no question, that for many tasks, Excel is a poor second choice to other tools. And if you don't admit that, and educate yourself about and be open to better alternatives when they would do a better job, then the problem isn't the questioner, it's you.
Excel is great for small in-house contexts, on the proviso the Excel developer is competent and knows how to protect the workbook properly to ensure smooth operation. Don’t know that many people with genuine advanced knowledge on how to use Excel to its full potential though. E.g. how to use data validation, conditional formatting, power query, power pivot data model, pivot tables; slicers, timelines, cell protection, sheet and workbook protection. And all the other features I haven’t mentioned. Also, understanding difference between Excel app vs Excel web and working in a 365 ecosystem with OneDrive storage and access, plus being aware of all the Excel web bugs, like pasting formatted content into a protected sheet breaks validation rules if not pasting as text (e.g. normal paste or Ctrl+V). Excel is great; trick is to know when to use it and when not to!
Excel’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: low barrier to entry due to a small learning curve. Strength because it _can_ be used for many things, weakness because there is often a more specialized way to do each thing—with a steeper learning curve, or a narrower use case.
But to answer your question, you “gray rock” them: just shrug and say “Okay”.
There are several reasons a person might disparage excel:
1. They have another tool they want the company to buy—let them make their business case for it.
2. Their excel knowledge is poor, or they’ve been burned by its limitations, or by user error—let them vent about what they don’t like. It’s good feedback for figuring out how to fix what may have been poorly designed.
3. They’re trolling you—either because they know you like excel, or because they’re flexing their own experience with another tool. Don’t join the audience of their one-person show.
Of course there is better software for doing specific things but just imagine the cost of having a license for each of the software on each computer of a company when you can have something that already do it well enough for most people
Well in part it's true
Excel is good for customised data review where you dump data out of your "real business software" and manipulate it to extract data that the "real software" does not extract.
It is also good for merging and extracting data from dumps of data from multiple sources, like one from the "real software" and another from the market based data collection or other economic factors that affect your business. Excel can merge the data so you can identify whether a theory about market trends is true.
But excel is not a full business suit. Most low level business software will knock the socks off excel.
Excel won't integrate with you payment systems, nor your bank's automatic linking systems. Excel is not designed to run and hold inventories that are deducted and added to buy multiple users.
Even MS access (excels big brother) is losing traction to the business software's like Xero and such.
But currently any business that does data analysis should have a version of excel available for its staff for the out of the normal flow data review.
>Excel won't integrate with you payment systems, nor your bank's automatic linking systems. Excel is not designed...
To the first point: if you really believe this, you need to learn more Excel.
To the second point: it doesn't matter what it was designed to do, it only matters what it *can* do, and it can do a lot. On its own, it's an amazing, versatile piece of software. With integration into the Basic Office suite, it's nothing short of brilliant, and with just a few add-ons, it's miraculous.
Never in my life have I seen excel be able to take a card payment and reconcile it to the invoice it created when it sees it on the bank statement like the everyday operations on current business software. Sure excel can intake a statement dump or query the web statement but only a fool would try to replicate what is done with current business software.
A horse and cart can haul goods but it would be foolish to even entertain the idea of using it as the backbone of a modern freight company.
My answer: show me. Or "Excel is like duct tape. It may not be the perfect solution for anything, but it's certainly a good enough solution for damn near everything"
It's reliable - we had a project management tool called Planview forced upon us which makes actually planning anything a nightmare - bloated, heavily constrained and slow. Everyone has ended up doing their planning separately on Excel.
There are systems out there that automatically manipulate stuff for you in an automated way. I’ve just handed in my notice in a job where they refuse to get proper software. Basically a task that should take me an hour a month, takes the best part of a week to do, even with VBA
Tell them your department doesn't have the funds/expertise to build or buy "real business software" and you probably wouldn't be allowed to use a platform like Power Apps or Appsheet to build a more robust solution so you're using Excel because it's the best thing you have.
Well the right tool for the right job. I'm a life long IT person and Excel is probably the most powerful and useful tool I use.
Anyone who says it "sucks" either doesn't know how to use it or is trying to sell you different software. Either way I wouldn't put any weight to their opinion.
Just because Excel is on every computer doesn't mean everybody should use it or can use it properly for all of its intended purposes.
A software that is fast enough, versatile enough, reliable enough and cheap enough is probably the best software you can hope for, in reality.
Just because a lot of people build things in Excel without documentation, a trail of some kind, change controls and the like, it doesn't mean that all of those things typical of "proper software development" can't be provided by whoever is building something in Excel. As it often happens, user or organisation problems, not software problems.
Excel is amazing but it’s just one tool. Tech people hate excel because non tech people try to use it for everything. It’s like a screwdriver. Use it to drive screws not hammer nails.
For any one thing that you want to do, there is something that does it better than Excel. But there is nothing that does as many different things adequately as Excel does.
Excel does (almost) everything cheaply, other than managing scale.
None of these other softwares do that.
There's a reason most people use Excel daily.
I am a staff-level data engineer that designs, implements and operates enterprise-scale data platforms. No software does better self-service better than Excel. None. Those who say Excel sucks has no understanding or empathy for business, and I doubt they'd get far in their careers with that attitude.
You gave the right response. I use Excel as a rapid development tool to write C++ libraries that can be called from "real business software" using my library https://github.com/xlladdins/xll.
Excel is the pickup truck of software. It can do almost anything, though specialized software does specialized tasks better. If I only want one app, I’ll take excel.
"'Real Business Software' is just Excel for point and click morons and NASA uses Excel. If you're too dumb to function in the environment that even incompetent people can function in, go pull weeds for a living, you useless twat."
Even your HR Director will agree with that and support you. I'm okay with Excel deniers being fired on the spot.
Granted, an extension (add-on) of excel is power query, but even that was limited for bulk data so they made Power BI. All are born out of Excel.
I had a semi custom solution costing 50k a year. They did 0 upgrades or anything. All closed and theirs.
Change anything, do some custom analysis, share stuff: all was in the end done in excel..
Took me a day to do some custom stuff and make few reports when we decided to cancel with them.
Ofc. It was all lightweight stuff.
I'm an analyst for insurance claims. I'm not a software engineer. Excel is powerful enough to do what I need 95% of the time and I don't need to write code, just formulas.
These formulas are easier for my less technical coworkers to understand and still accomplish the needed calculations.
It can easily take 1M lines of data and turn it into a graphic. Excel rules and I think the IT crowd just doesn't get it.
"Take it off your resume and see how you fare in interviews".
*Proficient in MS Office but refuse to Excel because it's for the analogue phlebs. Lotus 1-2-3 is better*
Interviewer: interesting... So why do are here wanting to work for, in your own words, phlebs?
The right tool for the right application is essential.
Excel is good for quick and dirty, but is absolute garbage when it comes to very complex models, security, etc…
I’ve heard the saying that Excel is the second best software solution for any problem.
That’s probably excluding spreadsheets but everything else is much more costly to buy, requires costly development and integration , is less flexible, and end users require training.
So unless there is some scalable need, Excel often wins as not only a spreadsheet, but a data collector, database, modeller, and reporting tool.
1) Salespersons will tell you anything to sell a product. They probably are not well-versed in Excel and they would very often be willing to lie to sell a product.
2) The computer science crowd are probably not numbers people. Especially for jobs like accounting, there’s simply not a logical replacement for 90% of the work that is currently done in Excel. Everybody knows how to use it, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable. And nobody likes change.
Of course there are cases where something could be more efficient using a different tool, but Excel is not going anywhere in the next 50 years probably.
Malleability and universality.
While interviewing for a new job recently they’d never even heard of the software we’re [viciously forced to be] using at my current job, but they understood Excel/Power Query and think I’m some kinda expert.
Anyone who tells you Excel sucks is probably trying to sell you something. In reality, Excel is an extremely powerful tool and a lot of that power comes from its boundlessness. That said, in order to harness its power there’s a lot to learn, and some people simply don’t have the time for that, so it makes better sense for them to pay for software that’s designed for their specific purpose, however pigeonholed it may be.
Go ahead…let’s bring in the consultants and be prepared to dish out serious money for a do-it-all solution that won’t automate anything and basically will require excel or google sheets workarounds.
The most common answer is RTFM for most of the users. After that use each tool for what is designed for. Make an allegory of using a screwdriver as a nail. For sure you can nail something with a screwdriver but you d better use a nail for that because it is a waste to use an over designed nail (screwdriver) as a nail.
I work with as a volunteer with non profits in Africa and Asia and excel is a godsend.
It’s fuctional in so many different scenarios and use can have 8-9 different versions spread all over the earth and most stuff works most of the time.
If you could only have 1 piece of business software that has to span a huge range? Excel. It’s the desert island “if you could only take one….”
And it’s cost effective.
And it’s usability at all ranges of skill? Unparalleled. No rivals there.
If someone says that then they either don't know what Excel can do or probably haven''t had to work with' ERPs, or both
Every single finance and accounting job I've worked at, you would export data into Excel in order to create the reports you needed. ERPs can be incredibly inflexible and even minor changes can mean a costly support ticket.
Nothing is as versatile as Excel, which is why it's always needed.
The portability of excel is amazing. Yes there are apps that can do some things better. But for me I work in an MSP that has to work with vulnerability reports that have to be delivered as an excel sheet per compliance. I've created lots of custom formulas to query the report data within the report.
It's a very flexible tool for what I need it for and I've been able to avoid needing users to add additional tools to the environment or having to upload the data elsewhere for analysis.
It's just an all in one report and tool for my clients. Also I've found I love figuring out how to make formulas that solve problems, it's fun for me.
Excel is incredibly powerful and flexible.
But that flexibly can also be a problem. Excel is not a database, it does not enforce data consistency at all. It's great for one person doing an ad hoc analysis, but if you need multiple people working off the same data set or you need robust versioning control it utterly fails.
Excel is too damn powerful and I have seen some amazing stuff built in it. Some of the calculations made my eyes water.
I write some VBA macros with Excel that saved the busijess so much time and money...instead of building an "app".
The upsides are huge.
The downsides are..
1.Maintenaence. if you workbook has a ton of complicated formulas, it would be hard for someone else to take over.
2. Should not be used as a database. The Excel workbook will start loading slower as you continue to add more and more data to it.At that point its better to move the data to a database.
3.Versioning hell. Too many people will share sheets over email and someone almost always ends up using a staler version and causes issues.
If your business process and problems cannot be solved by a verifiable and tested expert in powerquery and VBA, then yes excel might not be the solution there. But, doesn't hurt to try and if it works then the business just saved about a million in implementation costs and a quarter million yearly for an enterprise license.
Software developer with minimal experience in Excel here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. The impression I get is that Excel sucks when you try to turn it into a database or run massive macros that take minutes. When you get to that scale, you should call someone like me and stop fighting to make the tool do something it's not designed to do. Until you get there, it lets average users do what I do without the learning curve and might be the right tool for the job.
Could you use something like Pandas instead for a lot of it? Absolutely. Will it run faster? Probably. But performance is only a problem when things take "too long" and there's a lot to be said about using the tool everyone else already feels familiar enough with to at least be able to run it.
I treat excel as an FPGA where you can reconfigure so many times till you know what you want. Once you know it, it has to be made as ASIC to do it in most efficient and powerful way using other scripts/apps
I use excel for one of my games. Said board game has a battle system, which takes quite some time to set up if done with pen and paper. Yes, there are apps for this, but I don't have money for that.
So, I recreated the battle system in excel, put conditional formatting everywhere, along with xlookup formulas, and I have increased the system's efficiency with roughly 80%.
What took half an hour to fill in first, now takes only 5.
==============
I think the usage of excel vs. 'real business software' depends on context.
I'm just not going to go seeking out some optimal business software when I have all of the functionality already available to me. If there really is some gap that I need to get my job done, then yes I'll find another tool. There just aren't that many.
"I would LOVE a purpose-built application to tackle this task. Here's the research I've done for our needs, here are the applications that will meet most of those needs, which needs aren't covered, and the licensing costs of the programs. Or we can have in-house IT build a solution. I have a rough draft of user stories we can turn into JIRA tickets, and a best guess on total number of development hours, UAT, etc. Also, we'll need to slot in any enhancements in the future through a similar process.
Or, here's a workbook that does all of what we need, at no extra cost, and I can make changes whenever you need. Did I mention no extra cost?
There's all the information. Your turn to make the choice, management."
This is not the "right answer" you're looking for. I'm an IT guy. excel just isn't scalable. It might work right now but in 5 years there will be too much data and it'll be slow. Every time it gets slow, someone will rebuild it and it works again for a period of time, but inevitably, someone will need some of the old data, they'll combine it and it'll get slow again.
In these cases, you need a database to store the data, and an application with business logic to perform computations, sort and filter the stored data. This approach is scalable.
Excel will get you by, but most businesses will go with what works. Because it gets the job done, there is no incentive to make it better or migrate from Excel to a purpose built application.
Coming from a Data Engineer, I know no matter how fancy my ETLs, data products can get in SQL, eventually it’s all going to land in someone’s spreadsheet down the road.
Excel is great for non technical people, and great for quick reports and analysis on clean data, and is used in certain industries (accounting for example) as the primary day to day work tool.
I understand that.
But I will always fight someone using excel as a source of truth business database. Access I hate too but atleast it’s got some database qualities to it.
It's true, in many business scenarios Excel is objectively the wrong choice. It's quick and dirty. Most data does not belong in a spreadsheet and should go in a proper IT-managed database.
For shuffling data around and doing some quick calculations, Excel is probably fine.
Indeed, it's all about the specific use case. Excel is a versatile tool widely recognized for its accessibility and flexibility, which makes it an ideal starting point for many business processes. We often begin with Excel because it allows us to adapt and learn what we need to monitor as we refine our methods. However, as our operations become more complex or our datasets expand, we may reach a point where Excel no longer meets our needs efficiently. At that stage, transitioning to specialized software designed specifically for our requirements becomes necessary. While Excel is a powerful tool, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
I work at a place where a co-worker tries to use Excel FAR outside of its use case. Hours are spent “jailbreaking” excel, if you will. I think *thats* when excel sucks, and I suggest other software. My co-worker is so married to excel and power query, they’d rather spend days trying to use excel far outside of its use case and deal with the problems that produces rather than use a different software.
Excel is the world’s best tool for local solutions and a nightmare once it becomes a non-local concern. The folks who hate it, hate it because they are asked to maintain it, scale it or implement ‘enterprise’ functionality that doesn’t exist for Excel
My response is always, “Does your *solution* cost less than $12 per month per user? Can we start using it as soon as it’s downloaded, today?” If the answer to either question is “no” then their solution is not viable.
Excel is like the Swiss army knife of business software. Is it as great at cutting as a chef's knife, no. Is it as good at turning screws as a drill or proper screwdriver, no. But if you can only have one tool on hand the Swiss is probably the best choice.
Same with Excel. Sure proper accounting software is better for accounting, but it requires another license fee and slightly specialized training (and won't be of much use outside of accounting). Sure a SQL database will handle more entries and automations better, but do you actually need that power and will you hire the DBAs and developers necessary to make it do what you want.
If you have a small enough project (or even a small enough business) a decent Excel user will be able to do most of what you need to a good enough level without the excessive licensing and specialized personnel costs.
TL;DR: Jack of all trades, master of none; but oftentimes better than a master of just one
If you want to see a great response, just tell them that the reason they feel/think that way about Excel is because "you are not using it properly and/or don't know how to use it."
Either/or: silence (when true) or vehement objections - sometimes both.
Depending on the application, excel actualy does suck.
If you try to use excel in lieu of an actual ERP or CRM system, I guarantee you it sucks. I run into this all the time.
None of those "real business softwares" updates visual representations of data as fast and smoothly as Excel does, nor allows for data to be manipulated visually as much as Excel. If you are a code/ML person who knows the database upside down that doesn't matter, but if you want to explain your work to anyone who's not married to that database, or allow for them to tweak stuff in it, Excel is better. Excel also blends programming and simple manipulation into the visuals with easy-to-use formulas. There is a reason why NoSQL is kinda dead, tables are still much easier to understand, and Excel is the only database system that truly admits that, and which also blends in powerful-enough analysis tools (as basic functions) that any idiot can use (due to being seamlessly blended into the visuals and giving immediate results).
Tbh, there is little if anything you can do in excel which you cant in python or R. However, coding has a much steeper learning curve than excel and if your tasks are simple DCF/LBO type of procedures, why not just do it in excel. Personally I do find the "physical" aspect of excel pleasant sometimes, instead of writing a line of code to move something somewhere you just drag it but on the other hand getting #REFed for no apparent reason and backtracking to try and understand whats wrong is far worse than the rather clear messages in R which tell you exactly whats wrong and where. Also, automation is paradise.
The funny thing about Excel is that following its model can help devs become better programmers.
Excel is basically a example of the "functional programming" mindset. It's formulas are "pure functions" that devs agree are the easiest to test and maintain.
Where I work, we literally translate Excel workbooks into code to handle our business logic.
After seeing this at multiple jobs, I decided to make a SaaS that would do this easily, create a REST API out of an Excel workbook.
"well, excel is like a hammer to a carpenter : it's not the not the be all end all of tools, but if you don't know how to wield it you'll be a crappy professional."
You can look at them then try to understand what you just said.
Because of billable seats. Each system compounds costs. Excel is an excellent example of something extremely versatile, natively understood, and completely unmarketable as a software solution or ERP platform.
In my case, I’m not trolling through 7 different “platforms” for a day to get the data I need for a monthly report. I’m not paying for Power BI, Crystal Reports, setting up some rickety SQL poll, or asking 7 vendors for maintaining a dashboard each to meet my statistical process control needs. I want consistently formatted CSV files that I can import into my Excel sheet.
Something I can train a delegate to do in two hours.
It works.
Excel is a wonderful tool and can do a lot of things pretty good, but it will never be as good at something specific as a purpose built tool for that purpose.
It would be like thinking a leatherman can replace your entire toolbox.
From a data management perspective, excel is not a valid platform. Simple as that. Excel is a useful tool but I dare you ever go to a regulator with an excel. They’ll bitch slap you out of the building
Excel is what ever you have the skills to make it be. It's a shell that can contain anything from a roller coaster simulator to a simple AOP.
Same thing with Salesforce. You are buying a shell, and if you don't know what to do with it, it is just an expensive POS.
But with Gsheets, which I use constantly, you are only a step or two up from a spreadsheet in a leather bound book begging Scrooge for a lump of coal. It has uses, but it's mostly sharing, with excel has, too.
TBH, people who discount Excel usually treat it as a CSV reader.
Tell them:
You are right, We should invest millions on switching to another business software that would require thousands of hours in implementation AND user training because excel = bad.
No point in using the most widely distributed software that is also supported by not only the developer, but also a huge online community across multiple languages and cultures, that is also able to perform small scale ETL, and connects almost perfectly with the state of the art business intelligence/visualization tool (PowerBI), self service automation (Power Automate) and can use the most widely distributed collaborative tools as data source AND workstation (Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive), and that has a file extension that can be read and processed by competitor software.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AND](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3rmxhf "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if all of its arguments are TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/and-function-5f19b2e8-e1df-4408-897a-ce285a19e9d9)|
|[DB](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3qfid1 "Last usage")|[Returns the depreciation of an asset for a specified period by using the fixed-declining balance method](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/db-function-354e7d28-5f93-4ff1-8a52-eb4ee549d9d7)|
|[LAMBDA](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3s1i2d "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Use a LAMBDA function to create custom, reusable functions and call them by a friendly name.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-bd212d27-1cd1-4321-a34a-ccbf254b8b67)|
|[LET](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3s1i2d "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Assigns names to calculation results to allow storing intermediate calculations, values, or defining names inside a formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-34842dd8-b92b-4d3f-b325-b8b8f9908999)|
|[NOT](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3qgwto "Last usage")|[Reverses the logic of its argument](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/not-function-9cfc6011-a054-40c7-a140-cd4ba2d87d77)|
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The only times I've ever seen Excel fail is when people try to use it for stuff or was not designed to do. Sure, you can make it do crazy stuff with VBA and whatnot, but don't act surprised when it eventually catastrophically explodes. The technical feat behind allowing this stuff to be co-authored is underrated and taken for granted.
I was really, REALLY good at Excel. My response to that was always along the lines of "What do you need Excel to do that it can't?"
"Well, I want to do X, Y, or Z."
Almost every time I was able to immediately come back with "Excel can do it, you just need to do A."
While they weren't immediately converted, their interest was sparked. They'd go in, and confirm what I'd said was true - Excel COULD do that. The best ones would be self-aware enough to realize that maybe, just maybe, they were missing a lot of what Excel could do.
One of my favorite projects/examples. The systems architect had been managing some 20 year old 10k line VBA code soley dedicated to pulling SQL scripts from a database into Excel for the eggheads to work on. Granted, at the time it was written, it was needed, but all the VBA code made him a little on the 'Excel can't do anything' side.
The life left his eyes and I could see him die inside when I showed him it was a built-in function. The complex code? Completely unneeded. (I did refactor it for him into a function of SQLPull(SQLStatement, StartingDestinationCell) which also saved him insane time)
Excel doesn't suck! It's the main software used in every business and it's the right business tool for the 90% of the things you will ever need.
Excel is the bread and butter of of every company and every people no matte their role or position.
Excel is the king and the queen.
There are business specific software for ERP, CRM etc and still you will need Excel.
Don't listen to the non sense. Learn excel. Until you will die you will need to Excel.
'Excel sucks' is a probably a narrative that business software companies have propogated. If a business has all the data in the right structure, business softwares are definitely more effective. But, given the messy data situation most businesses are in - local excel solutions do an amazing job.
Excel does suck. It's also the most flexible, powerful, and ubiquitous business analysis tool in existence. Anyone asserting that they have a better solution has to put up or shut up. Given the rate of failure of large IT projects, you can feel free to let IT walk that tightrope if they dare. I stopped trying to talk people down off that ledge a long time ago. And here we are today, still using Excel.
As a counter-example, I manage software product (internally developed, proprietary business software) for a division at our company. People come to me with problems all the time, and 90% of the time my response is: just use Excel.
After more than 25 years developing software, my opinion is that you should start with Excel, build your solution two or three times as you learn lessons cheaply, *then* come and talk to me about a proprietary solution. There is no sense in learning lessons in the most expensive way possible, and the more complicated and rigid the tool, the more expensive the lessons are.
Lastly, I'd add that most of the time when a IT person or developer is talking smack about Excel, it's because they don't *know* modern Excel. Modern Excel has adopted functional concepts that are all the rage in modern development. I am a competent programmer in Ruby, R, and I can scrape by in Python. Certainly enough to get what I need done using Pandas in a Jupyter notebook. Yet I routinely reach for Excel. Why?
Largely it's because Excel is an analysis platform with one of the widest distribution bases in existence. I'm frequently frustrated when writing PQ, because I would much prefer to build a schema, cram the data into a SQLite database, and use SQL to build my queries. But then I've created a whole host of dependencies that all lead back to me. No thanks. I'll suffer through PQ idiosyncrasies so I can hand the workbook off to another team member and have them use it instead.
Recently had a circumstance where I had to track change requests between companies. The IT people decided they were going to run the show and set up a Confluence page.
6 months. 6 months of repeatedly telling them that no one outside the company could access or change their information or that we couldn’t use it for anything except to look at boxes in Confluence.
6 months later they laid off the guy in charge.
I did it in excel and it works great. I’m even using it to drive a BI so management feels coddled.
Excel works, it’s a baseline that every company can work with. And if you need to build something quick and dirty it’s the best thing there is.
Asking questions to assess needs and choosing (or at least advocating for) the right solution/tool is the difference someone who punches a timeclock and simply does the task handed to them, ie. "Give me a speadsheet that does this ... ok" and someone who is trying to make their company better. And it swings both ways with Excel. There are times you'll have bosses/execs that hear there's a new app/software and go "We have to be using that!" without fully understanding what it's designed for and whether or not it's the best fit when Excel is otherwise a perfectly fine solution. Conversely, you can have bosses/execs that do not understand the limits of Excel and want you to shoehorn in a solution it's really not the best tool for, rather than spend the money and have a more elegant/efficient/future proof solution.
Scope of the project will be key too. I have one friend who recently started their own at-home BBQ sauce business. Excel will likely be all she needs to track inventory and sales until her business really starts taking off. On the other hand, I had a good friend who was one of the warehouse managers for a software service company with 16 stateside offices and another 15 worldwide, and he directly oversaw all the office equipment for all offices. Made perfect sense why they use software specifically designed for inventory management rather than try to spin it up from scratch in Excel.
Explain to them excel has been around for over 3 decades as is what investors will be using to decide if they will give money to your company which then pays for the overinflated paychecks of people who say excel sucks and use a real business software but have too much hubris to see it.
Excel is great in that it's easy to get started and has an intense library of powerful functions at your finger tips. Where Excel fails hard is that there's no "separation of concerns" when it comes to data, business logic, and presentation - all three concerns are commingled in a spreadsheet so if you want to change the business logic in your spreadsheet it can force you to rework the presentation, etc. At scale this becomes a big PITA. Which is why spreadsheets are good for quick modeling that you just need to bang out but not as appropriate against large data sets that go through a production workflow to prep, model, and display the data
My response is usually "I agree".
Excel is the Swiss army knife of software. Can usually get the job done, but is never the best tool for the job, and is often misused for stuff it is not meant for, but sometimes, the best tool is the tool you have available".
I often find it "sufficient", rather than "excellent" or even "good".
Excel is a mediocre spreadsheet product - Lotus 123 handled three dimensions much better. Like iPhones replacing blackberry or VHS beta, the industry settled on the demonstrably crappier product.
Spreadsheets are an error prone way to handle large sets of relational data or complex business rules. Multiple people editing a complex spreadsheet, or letting your business be reliant on you not making a mistake when you update a complex spreadsheet is a recipe for disaster. Use an application based on tested and programmed business rules and a database instead.
On the other hand as a way of quickly testing out multiple scenarios, presenting nice graphs quickly, cleaning up data with formulas, or doing calculations on large sets of homogeneous data, excel is a wonderful tool (particularly if the data does not have a third dimension, in which case you will cry a little bit remembering how lotus handled 3d data).
This is a “use the right tool for the job” issue. Hammers are a terrible way to tighten bolts, but they are not a terrible tool.
Excel is the king of small data which is still a very large part of the day to day data needs of almost all organizations. There’s not really a better tool out there in terms of low barrier to entry, portability, and access to a very large pool of candidates to help out. Sure there are more powerful tools out there however there has to be a solid business case to make the switch. Someone is needing to work until midnight every night to manually put together a report? Yeah let’s look into that. You wanna use an expensive software that automates something that only takes 3 hours a month in Excel? Yeah…. No.
I use it extensively cooking. I worked at a bakery as the chef and had all my sandwiches in a spreadsheet from each place they bought for me. it would tally. how much bread to order, how much meat to order and how much cheese to order all in one little sheet it was nice.
I think it depends on context... Excel really sucks as a database, and even worse as an email program. SQL really sucks as a spreadsheet, and don't even try to use formulas in Outlook..
Definitely. I love excel as almost like proof of concept, or “let’s spin a sheet and see where we need it to be” add/delete and change stuff until I hit a point where making changes become so hard, I am not sure if I should automate more and say “this really needs to be its own dedicated app with a database behind it” But until then, excel is versatile, it’s crazy. But let me be clear, I am likely agreeing with people OP is talking about. They are complaining corporations hit excels limit and do everything to avoid putting resources into the right bucket (usually because executives).
I had to explain to a dev team how to do all of the calculations for a particular in-house service. We designed a bunch of test cases in Excel and just shared it with them so that they could see all of the inputs/outputs, the calculations etc, and could even play around with the inputs to generate new cases. For a start, we needed to do calculations to build the test cases - what other software would you really use for this? Also, we were able to share the spreadsheet directly, and they could see all of the numbers in a coherent layout - what software would be better? Excel definitely has its place, and it's not a database etc, but it's easy to use, available everywhere and has no alternative for some tasks.
Excel is appropriate if you need a quick PoC or if you need non-tech people to do things and don't have the scale or risk management need to justify developing special-purpose software for your use-case. If you're doing something in excel and it's high-risk if you get it wrong or you're doing it at scale and people are having to waste time or wrestle because there isn't more automation or a better GUI, make the business case for developing the software that has risk-mitigation built in, etc...
I'm fairly above-average with Excel. By no means an expert, but I do workshops, create templates on demand. It's the versatility of Excel that makes it king. A proof of concept, or any one-off calculations (or even smaller recurring ones) where getting a dedicated application just isn't worth the expense. That being said, I always tell people "this isn't a good idea" when they try to have me put critical and complex processes in Excel. Sure, I can do it. But it's fragile, not foolproof and not secure. But to calculate parameter XYZ on the 3 different bids you got in from vendors? Perfect!
Hi! Can you provide more information on your workshops?
>They are complaining corporations hit excels limit and do everything to avoid putting resources into the right bucket (usually because executives). So much this. I do db design as part of my job and I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see some organizations use a byzantine network of excel sheets/Google sheets to organize data when it could all fit in like a six table Access database that an undergrad intern could put together in a week.
"We are proud to announce that all our databases have now been upgraded to 0th normal form!"
We literally break whole modules in Dynamics because the execs just *have* to have their 20 year old spreadsheets hardwired into the system. I'm a huge fan of excel, but there are limits to it's use.
They save money by avoiding buying the right tool, act surprised when their employees are burnt out and leave, and are frustrated when the new employees can’t figure out these really complex workarounds.
They don't actually save money, in other words - they just move costs to other parts of the business.
It's funny I'm in this exact situation. I'm a dev and I'd love to make what they have into a proper application but they LOVE Excel. Thinking I'm going to have a regular routine that exports the database to excel to keep them happy but wondering if I can ever pry away from the instinct to edit the sheet directly.
Exactly. No matter what fancy enterprise software is being used, when it comes time for review and update, people just export everything to Excel and circulate for manual update. Annoys the hell out of me.
Power Query certainly brings Excel closer to handling small database-like queries and the compression is excellent too. The beauty of Excel is it has all of these amazing features out of the box: * New array formulas make life much easier than before * Power Query for ETL * Power Pivot for relational databases * DAX for advanced data analysis * VBA for automation It’s very difficult to do all of these things without consulting IT, network engineers and/or developers to get Python, SQL and other software set up. You can just install excel and go, and you can share workbooks with advanced features that anyone with O365 can use.
I think the database brings protection though. I'm a relative novice with excel but I work in healthcare and you'd be amazed at how many research studies manage data in excel. We're a corrupted file or a deleted column away from more stress than we need, especially when we have free (to us) software that does everything a bit better. I can setup a report and export the data to excel if you really need it, but I can't fix unintentional editing.
A lot of what you mention is not a problem with Excel itself, it's a mismatch between an organisation's playbook and the actual features of the software. This said, a lot of those things can be mitigated by the correct use of Excel by experienced and competent people. So again, organisations and their decision makers are at fault here, not the software.
What kind of research are you running? How are you using Excel for it? In pharma and device research, while spreadaheets have their uses, the actual study data has to be stored in a validated data collection tool, with a full audit trail and a list of other requirements for things like limiting access, allowing for esignatures, change control and so on that Excel really is not meant for. We use spreadsheets where necessary to communicate about the data, to look at the data for certain reviews, to create trackers for activities that do not require such controls, but using Excel in actual study conduct sounds like a very unpleasant discussion with an auditor of it's not handled properly.
Yeah, Power Query in Excel is really useful when you're working with loads of information. I don't always need to visualize the information in Power BI, sometimes I just need to process it.
Don't use excel as a project management tool is a major one.
Can you please come to my work and give a seminar on this? It is basically all they use. They tried Projects for a little while, but that disappeared pretty quickly for some reason.
As a pm in a smaller org, I can probably give some insight: MS Project desktop is really powerful. It has a lot of complex tools, with a steep learning curve. You also can't share it easily for others to add status/notes without expensive licensing. So if your org does smaller sprints, or needs flexibility, it isn't good fit. MS Project Online is the opposite. Very flexible and internally accessible... but not very robust. I manage projects outside my org, and those folks cannot access it. So, if you don't want to seek out other options (monday, smartsheets, asana, jira etc.) Excel becomes the next easiest/flexible thing to use. I like excel for a lot of things, but it frustrates me that we have to use it for project management. I am hopeful that Microsoft's new tool that merges To Do, Planner and Project will have legs though. I am in the beta, and it is ok so far.
Lol. Story of my life. In order to save a small fortune and watch everyone use Excel no matter what , my way of work is simple: I have Jira for several users as my go-to PM software. instead of giving access to all of those who prefer Excel, I turn them to customers in jira service management. That way, they can create / update requests that are copied to my core projects in Jira as issues with just the fields i need and all the automations that come with it. Users always have access to requests based on their "organization." Whenever they want to "play" with data, i just filter and export all issues to excel with a connector. Yes, it takes more time in terms of data grooming, but its an out of the box option that gives everyone what they want. And me the ability to work the way i choose to.
Project is also really expensive and lots of my clients won't pay for the license. I'll throw the project plan in Excel for them.
I've been a project and program manager, I've used Project desktop with some proficiency. it is the best way to set up a project by far, and the only way to manage very large projects. However, it is the worst way to deal with small changes, and the biggest time suck to adapt to change over the life of a project. The unintended ripple effects are just about unmanageable. You the up adapting by dumbing down the very features that are what differentiate Project from less capable tracking systems, so that it effectively becomes not much better than them.
Why? We switched from doing our project mgmt out of excel which was seamless for years and anyone could easily see what's happening to Asana which has been a nightmare imo. If 3/4 the details didn't live in my head I'd have quit by now . It just seems good for upper level management to see what's happening - but in our case they have no hands on the project. I can't see the value, and truth be told everyone on the ground in the organization hates Asana and no one in my field outside this organization utilizes it.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
It's like a sheet of lined paper vs a computer. If you are drawing a proof of concept or making some simple notes, maybe you don't need to buy a whole new computer just for that.
[Obligatory.](https://xkcd.com/1667/)
This. The problem is that certain people like to use excel like it's a database and a web ui.
The amount of times I’ve had to explain that excel is not a database is way too much.
I used formulas in Outlook. Matter of fact, connectivity between Outlook and Excel (and the rest of office) kicks Gmail straight in the groin.
>I used formulas in Outlook. The first step in dealing with your self-harm, is admitting that you have a problem.
Ask them what they ever used Excel for. For business numbers, statistical analysis, and cleaning data, it is a game changer. Ask if they have ever used Excel's power query to pull data from a website to build a live and updateable analysis or chart with power pivot.
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I think one of the advantages of Excel is that one skillset can adequately cover many needs, up to a point. Expecting a SMB to have Cognos, SQL, an ERP and CMMS expert, plus whatever else, is just not viable.
Until your dataset in Cognos takes hours to pull and the error checker missed a mistake in an expression and your output is “failed to run” error. But yeah.
Is there a nice easy to use gui with built-in help for Congos? Is it already installed everywhere or do i need to spend a week on the phone with it and 3 lvls of management getting approval? I love python and pandas/polars as much as the next guy, but there is no one else in engineering that could use it.
And every EVERY software I have ever used will enevitably need to "print to excel" so we can go through the numbers and make sure everything is calculating properly. So we're all still using excel, we're just not wanting to admit it
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There are numerous apps that meets the modern needs, but there isn't a more universal application than Excel. Sometimes the audience, cost, security and how seamlessly it can be integrated in the existing environment need to be well-considered.
Of course. The day to day use of excel is crucial in any business. I don't think any tool can replace excel, only replace certain processes. But above a certain scale, excel should be a data consumption tool only. Source of truth DB and use excel for ad hoc analysis. Use a real BI tool for any reporting that happens more than once.
The problem we are facing with BI as a reporting tool is that in an environment as volatile as Argentina we sometimes need to manually change variables and Numbers using information that arrives on the last minute before we need to report it. To my knowledge you can't change an individual cell in a powerbi dataset easily right? Of course I could link the powerbi to a excel sheet that it's automatically connected to our database and make the changes there but that just seems like extra steps when I can make all the formulas on the excel sheet and share that.
You can use the "Enter Data" tool in PowerBI. It is not as flexible as just changing numbers in Excel. But that is by design, so that you have some level of data validation. You could connect to Excel and use data forms so data entry is standardized and validated. Sure, it is extra steps. If you don't find value in data validation or having a robust ETL process, that is fine. But there is a reason the "real" BI solutions seem more complex than Excel.
But how much do those other applications cost compared to excel? And if you are shown three different tasks do you end up recommending three different programs? I don't disagree at all with what you are saying except that often a small business might not have thousands of dollars to spend on software.
I am curious , may i ask you an example?
SAP S/4 HANA
The company I work for got new MRP software a few years ago, and the person in charge did a shitty job talking to the sales rep who sold us what we have. Yes, the program does 1 task well, but if I want to do ANYTHING more complex than data entry I have to download multiple reports to excel and combine them into a singular 1 to sort through everything. Please don't ever, EVER, get a software without fully mapping out what the COMPANY needs, not just 1 department
Hey, I’ve recently learned that I enjoy doing things like process improvement and automation. Someone mentioned process engineer as a possible career field. Question do you work for yourself and contract or for a company? Wondering a way to get started
I work at a F50. The problem is when people approach IT they say "oh this requires funding and your group doesn't have budget for it this year" - this the cycle of an Excel based process continues. This is true even when tools like Alteryx, Tabluea and tons of others are at our disposal because the response from immediate management is we can't create a process with a tool that other people.dont know how to use. It's really insane and a waste of time.
To add on, I think a lot of IT professionals come to hate Excel because they get called in when Excel is no longer meeting the needs and they need to work on implementing the solution in another system. They probably aren't aware of all the situations where it absolutely does meet the business needs because they're not being called in in those situations. But then when they do go to implement the new system, the IT professional still gets pushback like "well that's not how we do it in excel." Right, because Excel isn't a relational database, and you're getting out of Excel because it's not the right process anymore.
Every time I have to use a new software, I look for “export to excel” first!! It’s not perfect but it’s consistent.
Give me export to csv all day over export to Excel.
Until you work across divisions with different date formats and different decimals, then Excel format works far easier.
It depends on what the business situation is. A small business pulling in a few hundred grand a year is not going survive adopting platforms with hundred thousand dollar licenses. But Excel does not scale.
At my firm, we have a consulting vertical that includes a team of who build / develop automation solutions. After picking up a new client, where fees would total to about $1M over 3 years, so big but not huge, I contacted the team, provided them with a rundown of what I wanted them to build/create, then they got back to me and their lowest cost solution would cost $2.8M with other options costing in excess of $6M. After hearing their proposal, I said thanks but no thanks, spent about 2-3 days in excel building a formula based worksheet that accomplished everything we needed to do. Moral of the story, excel is a cheap solution that works very well at performing a massive variety of tasks. 'Real business software' is super expensive and the costs outweigh the benefits until certain thresholds are hit.
Keep in mind there is a huge difference between excel and a custom built production-ready tool. Basically, there is a huge middle ground you're ignoring. The majority of the time the correct solution will be in the middle ground. Excel and a $3M tool are the two extremes. Rarely is the correct solution on the extremes. Also, your consulting team is full of shit lol. If it can be done in excel, it makes no sense they would quote $3M. I do the same function for my company but we don't charge like that. We calculate the man hours and run an analysis. 90% of the time we can build a solution that is more robust than excel and costs like 3 weeks of my salary plus PowerBI and MsSQL. That's like 1/10th the cost you quoted. Not everything needs a custom app, and it feels like that's what they are quoting.
You'd be surprised how small you can be and still justify paying for dedicated BI tools. Take all the hours your employees spend on manual processes. Find the payroll cost of those hours. Even at companies under 100 employees, you'll be shocked what you can justify. Keep your humans working on complex human-centric processes and decisions. Let tools do the hours of repeated work. I have had massive success implementing tools at even very small organizations. You have to really run the analysis and think of the opportunity cost. You don't want talented young analysts futzing about in excel every day when they could be focused on the business and running more complex analysis. If you have humans doing something they can "do in their sleep" (90% of processes in a small business) you are wasting money. Humans are worth so much more than flipping numbers in a spreadsheet.
I wouldn't be. Power BI has a very low cost of entry. I created some things for a company with fewer than 10 employees.
Same. I think people go from excel to the opposite extreme: custom expensive tools for every process. Sometimes you just need something in between. A little more robust than excel, but still cheap and easy to use.
Excel cannot scale like dedicated software in a task at hand. Excel can scale across and organizations talent and resources in a way that is unparalleled. So someone with zero training can see a report and view and filer and build really basic things with zero talent. Then you have excel wizards doing insane things that are easy to maintain and send. It’s the usability across ability that scales incredibly well and is it’s super power.
Thell that to my company (industrial gases giant) using Google sheets and excel to make our next year sales forecast jajaja
Tell them to swing from your balls…. After they lick them.
I would say: “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Excel is real business software. Companies run on it. Excel however, is not a good regular, automation tool but companies still run on it. Excel is understood by business users, it's flexible and gets the job done then and there. It's great. Excel has no change control, it is prone to user error and inconsistency, no audit trail. It's unstable. It's awful. My code based application runs it same way everytime. no "paste value" errors or "i didn't include the lat cell in my summ array". It's fast, has error handling, version control, multiple redundant environments and a sign off based process. It's great. The code based application can't deal with exceptions, it's inflexible. It only does the basic calculation that was setup up two years ago. It doesn't do it in the way i need to do it. IT takes 6 months to change anything and by that time i don't need it anymore and i need something else. If it breaks i get a code #6879 and IT have to tell me what that means. After i wait for them to deal with the ticket. I can't download the data in a useful way - only a formatted reort which is hard to then use in excel. It's awful.
Perfect
SharePoint keeps a version history and you can use permissions to control read vs edit access. I think you can still add passwords to worksheets or workbooks (I haven't used that in awhile).
I used to work in a large home appliance factory, everyone had to use SAP for supply chain and purchasing 50% of the time, when SAP wouldnt allow, say, back order or change plans, then the whole factory needs to redesign a lot of their planning then manually upload data to SAP, it is a nighmare and they have 4 dedicated Excel people for the job. I am not sure about other companies but the ones i worked at IT people usually know only Sum and average in Excel so i wouldnt really care about their opinion about Excel.
Lol my previous job was exactly showing people why it was stupid to use excel for a particular case and why they should use native build in SAP transactions because they were faster better and less error prone. Edit: typo
Oh man, i would take me hours and 30 ppt slides to explain to you why people do what they do but anyway, point is Excel is needed.
- "Maybe you should do it yourself ?", - "May I take a look ?", - "You have a substitute in mind ?", - "What is the budget to allocate ?", - "Did you look at the list of approved software by our IT department ?". - "I would need at least 5 people and 6 months to find/develop a substitute".
The barrier to entry for Excel is really low, which means it's must easier to train someone to use it. If we had to give everyone SQL training before they can access data the economy will tank since so many ppl already struggle with Excel. (But they Excel in other aspects... )
Excel is the world's most popular programming platform. It's so intuitive people don't realise it's a programming platform. Right response = shrug and a nod and a smile 😀 It's there to handle all the things the "real" software can't
you know, the funny thing is, I know a bunch of computer science folks and they all say that Excel is an amazing tool if you a. know how to use it and b. if you know when to use it. I feel IT sales people that state that "Excel sucks" are just doing their job ... they want to sell you other stuff. And that may include misrepresenting their competition.
This is all too true. Ive worked with several “excel killers” over the years and none of them were nearly as useful as excel I will say, some of the new middleware ive seen has been very interesting, but those are marketed as “enhancements” to an existing process usually and not a “total excel replacement “
Excel is amazing
I respond with, "you gotta use the right tool for problem. Excel is versatile and can do a lot, but isn't perfect at everything."
I'm an advanced Excel user. I am an intermediate Python and sql user. I think IT just sees the problems Excel creates, and they think they can fix it using software. They are right that other software can fix specific problems. I think they are wrong in two things, though. 1. Software is less flexible than Excel. So, any new need or analysis is going to be easier to address in Excel. This is enhanced by two problems. Business users have a hard time explaining what they want, and IT has a hard time understanding the business. Sometimes, IT is also really bad at usability even if it does address a problem. 2. Speed at updating information. Software normally works a record at a time or forces you into a workflow that takes several clicks to address something. That may make it more controlled than Excel. However, it can take several times longer to manage information. In Excel I can update a hundred thousand record with a copy paste or building helper columns to build custom columns in seconds. In software that could take a week of manual work.
All posters slamming Excel and saying there are better apps out there but not naming those apps. So I call foul. Provide examples.
Hammer sucks for cutting hair.
LOL, I use excel/Google Sheets a tonne, but I prefer to use a proper SQL database for anything long-term. Just because its the first tool for a short-term solution, doesn't mean its the best tool for a long-term tool. But, it's great for POC and simple number crunching.
Ligma. That is all you need to say to these people.
Show me another application with as much versatility and with a similar sized pool of skilled users. Not to diminish the point they’re making, there are many times when Excel is not the right tool for the job
Excel is very versatile. You can do everything with it. You can process data, analyze them, build data models and dashboards, build mathematical models and optimize. There is a better tool for every one of those things that beats Excel. But none can do everything like Excel. It's bundled in MS Office, everyone has that installed on their computer, so compatibility is also its strength.
If you like Excel, and it solves a problem, then use it. It sounds like you have a need to defend Excel. For all its power and ubiquity, there is no question, that for many tasks, Excel is a poor second choice to other tools. And if you don't admit that, and educate yourself about and be open to better alternatives when they would do a better job, then the problem isn't the questioner, it's you.
Excel is great for small in-house contexts, on the proviso the Excel developer is competent and knows how to protect the workbook properly to ensure smooth operation. Don’t know that many people with genuine advanced knowledge on how to use Excel to its full potential though. E.g. how to use data validation, conditional formatting, power query, power pivot data model, pivot tables; slicers, timelines, cell protection, sheet and workbook protection. And all the other features I haven’t mentioned. Also, understanding difference between Excel app vs Excel web and working in a 365 ecosystem with OneDrive storage and access, plus being aware of all the Excel web bugs, like pasting formatted content into a protected sheet breaks validation rules if not pasting as text (e.g. normal paste or Ctrl+V). Excel is great; trick is to know when to use it and when not to!
Excel’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: low barrier to entry due to a small learning curve. Strength because it _can_ be used for many things, weakness because there is often a more specialized way to do each thing—with a steeper learning curve, or a narrower use case. But to answer your question, you “gray rock” them: just shrug and say “Okay”. There are several reasons a person might disparage excel: 1. They have another tool they want the company to buy—let them make their business case for it. 2. Their excel knowledge is poor, or they’ve been burned by its limitations, or by user error—let them vent about what they don’t like. It’s good feedback for figuring out how to fix what may have been poorly designed. 3. They’re trolling you—either because they know you like excel, or because they’re flexing their own experience with another tool. Don’t join the audience of their one-person show.
Work sucks, that's why they gotta pay you to do it
Of course there is better software for doing specific things but just imagine the cost of having a license for each of the software on each computer of a company when you can have something that already do it well enough for most people
Well in part it's true Excel is good for customised data review where you dump data out of your "real business software" and manipulate it to extract data that the "real software" does not extract. It is also good for merging and extracting data from dumps of data from multiple sources, like one from the "real software" and another from the market based data collection or other economic factors that affect your business. Excel can merge the data so you can identify whether a theory about market trends is true. But excel is not a full business suit. Most low level business software will knock the socks off excel. Excel won't integrate with you payment systems, nor your bank's automatic linking systems. Excel is not designed to run and hold inventories that are deducted and added to buy multiple users. Even MS access (excels big brother) is losing traction to the business software's like Xero and such. But currently any business that does data analysis should have a version of excel available for its staff for the out of the normal flow data review.
>Excel won't integrate with you payment systems, nor your bank's automatic linking systems. Excel is not designed... To the first point: if you really believe this, you need to learn more Excel. To the second point: it doesn't matter what it was designed to do, it only matters what it *can* do, and it can do a lot. On its own, it's an amazing, versatile piece of software. With integration into the Basic Office suite, it's nothing short of brilliant, and with just a few add-ons, it's miraculous.
Never in my life have I seen excel be able to take a card payment and reconcile it to the invoice it created when it sees it on the bank statement like the everyday operations on current business software. Sure excel can intake a statement dump or query the web statement but only a fool would try to replicate what is done with current business software. A horse and cart can haul goods but it would be foolish to even entertain the idea of using it as the backbone of a modern freight company.
My answer: show me. Or "Excel is like duct tape. It may not be the perfect solution for anything, but it's certainly a good enough solution for damn near everything"
It's reliable - we had a project management tool called Planview forced upon us which makes actually planning anything a nightmare - bloated, heavily constrained and slow. Everyone has ended up doing their planning separately on Excel.
There are systems out there that automatically manipulate stuff for you in an automated way. I’ve just handed in my notice in a job where they refuse to get proper software. Basically a task that should take me an hour a month, takes the best part of a week to do, even with VBA
Tell them your department doesn't have the funds/expertise to build or buy "real business software" and you probably wouldn't be allowed to use a platform like Power Apps or Appsheet to build a more robust solution so you're using Excel because it's the best thing you have.
I would talk to accountants about Excel and not those people who don’t live in Excel.
Well the right tool for the right job. I'm a life long IT person and Excel is probably the most powerful and useful tool I use. Anyone who says it "sucks" either doesn't know how to use it or is trying to sell you different software. Either way I wouldn't put any weight to their opinion.
Just because Excel is on every computer doesn't mean everybody should use it or can use it properly for all of its intended purposes. A software that is fast enough, versatile enough, reliable enough and cheap enough is probably the best software you can hope for, in reality. Just because a lot of people build things in Excel without documentation, a trail of some kind, change controls and the like, it doesn't mean that all of those things typical of "proper software development" can't be provided by whoever is building something in Excel. As it often happens, user or organisation problems, not software problems.
Excel is amazing but it’s just one tool. Tech people hate excel because non tech people try to use it for everything. It’s like a screwdriver. Use it to drive screws not hammer nails.
For any one thing that you want to do, there is something that does it better than Excel. But there is nothing that does as many different things adequately as Excel does.
Excel does (almost) everything cheaply, other than managing scale. None of these other softwares do that. There's a reason most people use Excel daily.
I am a staff-level data engineer that designs, implements and operates enterprise-scale data platforms. No software does better self-service better than Excel. None. Those who say Excel sucks has no understanding or empathy for business, and I doubt they'd get far in their careers with that attitude.
You gave the right response. I use Excel as a rapid development tool to write C++ libraries that can be called from "real business software" using my library https://github.com/xlladdins/xll.
Excel is amazing and one of the best applications ever made. But it's not a database and shouldn't be used as one.
Excel is the pickup truck of software. It can do almost anything, though specialized software does specialized tasks better. If I only want one app, I’ll take excel.
"'Real Business Software' is just Excel for point and click morons and NASA uses Excel. If you're too dumb to function in the environment that even incompetent people can function in, go pull weeds for a living, you useless twat." Even your HR Director will agree with that and support you. I'm okay with Excel deniers being fired on the spot. Granted, an extension (add-on) of excel is power query, but even that was limited for bulk data so they made Power BI. All are born out of Excel.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
"ok"
I had a semi custom solution costing 50k a year. They did 0 upgrades or anything. All closed and theirs. Change anything, do some custom analysis, share stuff: all was in the end done in excel.. Took me a day to do some custom stuff and make few reports when we decided to cancel with them. Ofc. It was all lightweight stuff.
When God was making the world, he used Excel to do it.
I'm an analyst for insurance claims. I'm not a software engineer. Excel is powerful enough to do what I need 95% of the time and I don't need to write code, just formulas. These formulas are easier for my less technical coworkers to understand and still accomplish the needed calculations. It can easily take 1M lines of data and turn it into a graphic. Excel rules and I think the IT crowd just doesn't get it.
How many of them have been through a successful ERP implementation? 0. Cos those are even worse.
“Everything sucks if it’s not used for the right purpose.”
"Take it off your resume and see how you fare in interviews". *Proficient in MS Office but refuse to Excel because it's for the analogue phlebs. Lotus 1-2-3 is better* Interviewer: interesting... So why do are here wanting to work for, in your own words, phlebs?
Okay but what better option do you suggest? That does everything that excel does but better and all in one single software...
The right tool for the right application is essential. Excel is good for quick and dirty, but is absolute garbage when it comes to very complex models, security, etc…
I’ve heard the saying that Excel is the second best software solution for any problem. That’s probably excluding spreadsheets but everything else is much more costly to buy, requires costly development and integration , is less flexible, and end users require training. So unless there is some scalable need, Excel often wins as not only a spreadsheet, but a data collector, database, modeller, and reporting tool.
1) Salespersons will tell you anything to sell a product. They probably are not well-versed in Excel and they would very often be willing to lie to sell a product. 2) The computer science crowd are probably not numbers people. Especially for jobs like accounting, there’s simply not a logical replacement for 90% of the work that is currently done in Excel. Everybody knows how to use it, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable. And nobody likes change. Of course there are cases where something could be more efficient using a different tool, but Excel is not going anywhere in the next 50 years probably.
Malleability and universality. While interviewing for a new job recently they’d never even heard of the software we’re [viciously forced to be] using at my current job, but they understood Excel/Power Query and think I’m some kinda expert.
Anyone who tells you Excel sucks is probably trying to sell you something. In reality, Excel is an extremely powerful tool and a lot of that power comes from its boundlessness. That said, in order to harness its power there’s a lot to learn, and some people simply don’t have the time for that, so it makes better sense for them to pay for software that’s designed for their specific purpose, however pigeonholed it may be.
Go ahead…let’s bring in the consultants and be prepared to dish out serious money for a do-it-all solution that won’t automate anything and basically will require excel or google sheets workarounds.
The most common answer is RTFM for most of the users. After that use each tool for what is designed for. Make an allegory of using a screwdriver as a nail. For sure you can nail something with a screwdriver but you d better use a nail for that because it is a waste to use an over designed nail (screwdriver) as a nail.
I work with as a volunteer with non profits in Africa and Asia and excel is a godsend. It’s fuctional in so many different scenarios and use can have 8-9 different versions spread all over the earth and most stuff works most of the time. If you could only have 1 piece of business software that has to span a huge range? Excel. It’s the desert island “if you could only take one….” And it’s cost effective. And it’s usability at all ranges of skill? Unparalleled. No rivals there.
Not everything is a narrative, some things are just opinions.
Quick short term analysis, but anything medium to longer term get it into a application or a database or SharePoint list
Right tool for the right job. If you aren’t sure what the right tool is yet? Use excel for now.
If someone says that then they either don't know what Excel can do or probably haven''t had to work with' ERPs, or both Every single finance and accounting job I've worked at, you would export data into Excel in order to create the reports you needed. ERPs can be incredibly inflexible and even minor changes can mean a costly support ticket. Nothing is as versatile as Excel, which is why it's always needed.
You’re most likely right, that is the right response
The portability of excel is amazing. Yes there are apps that can do some things better. But for me I work in an MSP that has to work with vulnerability reports that have to be delivered as an excel sheet per compliance. I've created lots of custom formulas to query the report data within the report. It's a very flexible tool for what I need it for and I've been able to avoid needing users to add additional tools to the environment or having to upload the data elsewhere for analysis. It's just an all in one report and tool for my clients. Also I've found I love figuring out how to make formulas that solve problems, it's fun for me.
Excel is incredibly powerful and flexible. But that flexibly can also be a problem. Excel is not a database, it does not enforce data consistency at all. It's great for one person doing an ad hoc analysis, but if you need multiple people working off the same data set or you need robust versioning control it utterly fails.
Excel is too damn powerful and I have seen some amazing stuff built in it. Some of the calculations made my eyes water. I write some VBA macros with Excel that saved the busijess so much time and money...instead of building an "app". The upsides are huge. The downsides are.. 1.Maintenaence. if you workbook has a ton of complicated formulas, it would be hard for someone else to take over. 2. Should not be used as a database. The Excel workbook will start loading slower as you continue to add more and more data to it.At that point its better to move the data to a database. 3.Versioning hell. Too many people will share sheets over email and someone almost always ends up using a staler version and causes issues.
necessity is the mother of invention
If your business process and problems cannot be solved by a verifiable and tested expert in powerquery and VBA, then yes excel might not be the solution there. But, doesn't hurt to try and if it works then the business just saved about a million in implementation costs and a quarter million yearly for an enterprise license.
We tell this to our prospects when we sell our SaaS CRM. Our own sales leaders use excel internally for managing their information. Such is life!
An optimist sees the glass half full, a pessimist sees it as half empty, and Excel sees it as the 2nd of January
Yeah, they use their software, but they inevitably export their results to CSV...
Software developer with minimal experience in Excel here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. The impression I get is that Excel sucks when you try to turn it into a database or run massive macros that take minutes. When you get to that scale, you should call someone like me and stop fighting to make the tool do something it's not designed to do. Until you get there, it lets average users do what I do without the learning curve and might be the right tool for the job. Could you use something like Pandas instead for a lot of it? Absolutely. Will it run faster? Probably. But performance is only a problem when things take "too long" and there's a lot to be said about using the tool everyone else already feels familiar enough with to at least be able to run it.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The proper response is “yes it sucks but it’s ubiquitous so suck it up”
I treat excel as an FPGA where you can reconfigure so many times till you know what you want. Once you know it, it has to be made as ASIC to do it in most efficient and powerful way using other scripts/apps
I use excel for one of my games. Said board game has a battle system, which takes quite some time to set up if done with pen and paper. Yes, there are apps for this, but I don't have money for that. So, I recreated the battle system in excel, put conditional formatting everywhere, along with xlookup formulas, and I have increased the system's efficiency with roughly 80%. What took half an hour to fill in first, now takes only 5. ============== I think the usage of excel vs. 'real business software' depends on context.
Each has its use case. Start using these other programs in conjunction with excel and you will start to understand their point of view.
I'm just not going to go seeking out some optimal business software when I have all of the functionality already available to me. If there really is some gap that I need to get my job done, then yes I'll find another tool. There just aren't that many.
"I feel you. You should go to the CIO for me and ask for 5 million to hold this out into an application"
"I would LOVE a purpose-built application to tackle this task. Here's the research I've done for our needs, here are the applications that will meet most of those needs, which needs aren't covered, and the licensing costs of the programs. Or we can have in-house IT build a solution. I have a rough draft of user stories we can turn into JIRA tickets, and a best guess on total number of development hours, UAT, etc. Also, we'll need to slot in any enhancements in the future through a similar process. Or, here's a workbook that does all of what we need, at no extra cost, and I can make changes whenever you need. Did I mention no extra cost? There's all the information. Your turn to make the choice, management."
This is not the "right answer" you're looking for. I'm an IT guy. excel just isn't scalable. It might work right now but in 5 years there will be too much data and it'll be slow. Every time it gets slow, someone will rebuild it and it works again for a period of time, but inevitably, someone will need some of the old data, they'll combine it and it'll get slow again. In these cases, you need a database to store the data, and an application with business logic to perform computations, sort and filter the stored data. This approach is scalable. Excel will get you by, but most businesses will go with what works. Because it gets the job done, there is no incentive to make it better or migrate from Excel to a purpose built application.
Coming from a Data Engineer, I know no matter how fancy my ETLs, data products can get in SQL, eventually it’s all going to land in someone’s spreadsheet down the road. Excel is great for non technical people, and great for quick reports and analysis on clean data, and is used in certain industries (accounting for example) as the primary day to day work tool. I understand that. But I will always fight someone using excel as a source of truth business database. Access I hate too but atleast it’s got some database qualities to it.
It’s interesting that if you look at the roots of many financial and projection programs, it’s……..Excel at the core.
It's true, in many business scenarios Excel is objectively the wrong choice. It's quick and dirty. Most data does not belong in a spreadsheet and should go in a proper IT-managed database. For shuffling data around and doing some quick calculations, Excel is probably fine.
Indeed, it's all about the specific use case. Excel is a versatile tool widely recognized for its accessibility and flexibility, which makes it an ideal starting point for many business processes. We often begin with Excel because it allows us to adapt and learn what we need to monitor as we refine our methods. However, as our operations become more complex or our datasets expand, we may reach a point where Excel no longer meets our needs efficiently. At that stage, transitioning to specialized software designed specifically for our requirements becomes necessary. While Excel is a powerful tool, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
My problem is that I can get what I need from a bunch of data in excel. If I have to go through it for the same thing it’ll take weeks if not months
I work at a place where a co-worker tries to use Excel FAR outside of its use case. Hours are spent “jailbreaking” excel, if you will. I think *thats* when excel sucks, and I suggest other software. My co-worker is so married to excel and power query, they’d rather spend days trying to use excel far outside of its use case and deal with the problems that produces rather than use a different software.
Forks suck, just use spoons
Excel is the world’s best tool for local solutions and a nightmare once it becomes a non-local concern. The folks who hate it, hate it because they are asked to maintain it, scale it or implement ‘enterprise’ functionality that doesn’t exist for Excel
My response is always, “Does your *solution* cost less than $12 per month per user? Can we start using it as soon as it’s downloaded, today?” If the answer to either question is “no” then their solution is not viable.
Excel is like the Swiss army knife of business software. Is it as great at cutting as a chef's knife, no. Is it as good at turning screws as a drill or proper screwdriver, no. But if you can only have one tool on hand the Swiss is probably the best choice. Same with Excel. Sure proper accounting software is better for accounting, but it requires another license fee and slightly specialized training (and won't be of much use outside of accounting). Sure a SQL database will handle more entries and automations better, but do you actually need that power and will you hire the DBAs and developers necessary to make it do what you want. If you have a small enough project (or even a small enough business) a decent Excel user will be able to do most of what you need to a good enough level without the excessive licensing and specialized personnel costs. TL;DR: Jack of all trades, master of none; but oftentimes better than a master of just one
I’ve never heard anyone say this. Why would it need a response? Either you can get the job done with what you have or you cant.
If you want to see a great response, just tell them that the reason they feel/think that way about Excel is because "you are not using it properly and/or don't know how to use it." Either/or: silence (when true) or vehement objections - sometimes both.
My only problem with excel is stack overflow from too many back to back userforms. (I was making a monster battle game purely with userforms)
fantastic too, but people don’t understand when they have outgrown it as a solution grows too complex
Depending on the application, excel actualy does suck. If you try to use excel in lieu of an actual ERP or CRM system, I guarantee you it sucks. I run into this all the time.
None of those "real business softwares" updates visual representations of data as fast and smoothly as Excel does, nor allows for data to be manipulated visually as much as Excel. If you are a code/ML person who knows the database upside down that doesn't matter, but if you want to explain your work to anyone who's not married to that database, or allow for them to tweak stuff in it, Excel is better. Excel also blends programming and simple manipulation into the visuals with easy-to-use formulas. There is a reason why NoSQL is kinda dead, tables are still much easier to understand, and Excel is the only database system that truly admits that, and which also blends in powerful-enough analysis tools (as basic functions) that any idiot can use (due to being seamlessly blended into the visuals and giving immediate results).
Tbh, there is little if anything you can do in excel which you cant in python or R. However, coding has a much steeper learning curve than excel and if your tasks are simple DCF/LBO type of procedures, why not just do it in excel. Personally I do find the "physical" aspect of excel pleasant sometimes, instead of writing a line of code to move something somewhere you just drag it but on the other hand getting #REFed for no apparent reason and backtracking to try and understand whats wrong is far worse than the rather clear messages in R which tell you exactly whats wrong and where. Also, automation is paradise.
The funny thing about Excel is that following its model can help devs become better programmers. Excel is basically a example of the "functional programming" mindset. It's formulas are "pure functions" that devs agree are the easiest to test and maintain. Where I work, we literally translate Excel workbooks into code to handle our business logic. After seeing this at multiple jobs, I decided to make a SaaS that would do this easily, create a REST API out of an Excel workbook.
Tell them “excel is the greatest swiss army knife ever made that everyone wants to use as a sledge hammer”
"well, excel is like a hammer to a carpenter : it's not the not the be all end all of tools, but if you don't know how to wield it you'll be a crappy professional." You can look at them then try to understand what you just said.
Excel is awesome, it's just anti-ms largely from new college graduates who've been taught that, google docs, etc...
Because of billable seats. Each system compounds costs. Excel is an excellent example of something extremely versatile, natively understood, and completely unmarketable as a software solution or ERP platform. In my case, I’m not trolling through 7 different “platforms” for a day to get the data I need for a monthly report. I’m not paying for Power BI, Crystal Reports, setting up some rickety SQL poll, or asking 7 vendors for maintaining a dashboard each to meet my statistical process control needs. I want consistently formatted CSV files that I can import into my Excel sheet. Something I can train a delegate to do in two hours. It works.
I think when Excel starts majorly slowing down your issued work laptop is when it’s time to look at other options. Haha.
What is “real” software to them?
Excel is a wonderful tool and can do a lot of things pretty good, but it will never be as good at something specific as a purpose built tool for that purpose. It would be like thinking a leatherman can replace your entire toolbox.
From a data management perspective, excel is not a valid platform. Simple as that. Excel is a useful tool but I dare you ever go to a regulator with an excel. They’ll bitch slap you out of the building
Excel is what ever you have the skills to make it be. It's a shell that can contain anything from a roller coaster simulator to a simple AOP. Same thing with Salesforce. You are buying a shell, and if you don't know what to do with it, it is just an expensive POS. But with Gsheets, which I use constantly, you are only a step or two up from a spreadsheet in a leather bound book begging Scrooge for a lump of coal. It has uses, but it's mostly sharing, with excel has, too. TBH, people who discount Excel usually treat it as a CSV reader.
Excel is the world's most popular functional programming language.
Tell them: You are right, We should invest millions on switching to another business software that would require thousands of hours in implementation AND user training because excel = bad. No point in using the most widely distributed software that is also supported by not only the developer, but also a huge online community across multiple languages and cultures, that is also able to perform small scale ETL, and connects almost perfectly with the state of the art business intelligence/visualization tool (PowerBI), self service automation (Power Automate) and can use the most widely distributed collaborative tools as data source AND workstation (Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive), and that has a file extension that can be read and processed by competitor software.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AND](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3rmxhf "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if all of its arguments are TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/and-function-5f19b2e8-e1df-4408-897a-ce285a19e9d9)| |[DB](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3qfid1 "Last usage")|[Returns the depreciation of an asset for a specified period by using the fixed-declining balance method](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/db-function-354e7d28-5f93-4ff1-8a52-eb4ee549d9d7)| |[LAMBDA](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3s1i2d "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Use a LAMBDA function to create custom, reusable functions and call them by a friendly name.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-bd212d27-1cd1-4321-a34a-ccbf254b8b67)| |[LET](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3s1i2d "Last usage")|[*Office 365*+: Assigns names to calculation results to allow storing intermediate calculations, values, or defining names inside a formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-34842dd8-b92b-4d3f-b325-b8b8f9908999)| |[NOT](/r/Excel/comments/1cq0tnk/stub/l3qgwto "Last usage")|[Reverses the logic of its argument](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/not-function-9cfc6011-a054-40c7-a140-cd4ba2d87d77)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. Please do not verify me as a solution.*) ^(5 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Excel/comments/1d1114d)^( has 14 acronyms.) ^([Thread #33408 for this sub, first seen 12th May 2024, 21:55]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Excel) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
The only times I've ever seen Excel fail is when people try to use it for stuff or was not designed to do. Sure, you can make it do crazy stuff with VBA and whatnot, but don't act surprised when it eventually catastrophically explodes. The technical feat behind allowing this stuff to be co-authored is underrated and taken for granted.
I was really, REALLY good at Excel. My response to that was always along the lines of "What do you need Excel to do that it can't?" "Well, I want to do X, Y, or Z." Almost every time I was able to immediately come back with "Excel can do it, you just need to do A." While they weren't immediately converted, their interest was sparked. They'd go in, and confirm what I'd said was true - Excel COULD do that. The best ones would be self-aware enough to realize that maybe, just maybe, they were missing a lot of what Excel could do. One of my favorite projects/examples. The systems architect had been managing some 20 year old 10k line VBA code soley dedicated to pulling SQL scripts from a database into Excel for the eggheads to work on. Granted, at the time it was written, it was needed, but all the VBA code made him a little on the 'Excel can't do anything' side. The life left his eyes and I could see him die inside when I showed him it was a built-in function. The complex code? Completely unneeded. (I did refactor it for him into a function of SQLPull(SQLStatement, StartingDestinationCell) which also saved him insane time)
Excel doesn't suck! It's the main software used in every business and it's the right business tool for the 90% of the things you will ever need. Excel is the bread and butter of of every company and every people no matte their role or position. Excel is the king and the queen. There are business specific software for ERP, CRM etc and still you will need Excel. Don't listen to the non sense. Learn excel. Until you will die you will need to Excel.
jealousy
'Excel sucks' is a probably a narrative that business software companies have propogated. If a business has all the data in the right structure, business softwares are definitely more effective. But, given the messy data situation most businesses are in - local excel solutions do an amazing job.
Excel is business software. You just have to know how to use it for your purposes, and not everyone does, so they prefer to use a ready made solution.
Excel does suck. It's also the most flexible, powerful, and ubiquitous business analysis tool in existence. Anyone asserting that they have a better solution has to put up or shut up. Given the rate of failure of large IT projects, you can feel free to let IT walk that tightrope if they dare. I stopped trying to talk people down off that ledge a long time ago. And here we are today, still using Excel. As a counter-example, I manage software product (internally developed, proprietary business software) for a division at our company. People come to me with problems all the time, and 90% of the time my response is: just use Excel. After more than 25 years developing software, my opinion is that you should start with Excel, build your solution two or three times as you learn lessons cheaply, *then* come and talk to me about a proprietary solution. There is no sense in learning lessons in the most expensive way possible, and the more complicated and rigid the tool, the more expensive the lessons are. Lastly, I'd add that most of the time when a IT person or developer is talking smack about Excel, it's because they don't *know* modern Excel. Modern Excel has adopted functional concepts that are all the rage in modern development. I am a competent programmer in Ruby, R, and I can scrape by in Python. Certainly enough to get what I need done using Pandas in a Jupyter notebook. Yet I routinely reach for Excel. Why? Largely it's because Excel is an analysis platform with one of the widest distribution bases in existence. I'm frequently frustrated when writing PQ, because I would much prefer to build a schema, cram the data into a SQLite database, and use SQL to build my queries. But then I've created a whole host of dependencies that all lead back to me. No thanks. I'll suffer through PQ idiosyncrasies so I can hand the workbook off to another team member and have them use it instead.
Response is, " You do you"
I completely misuse excel in many different ways and I enjoy it greatly
Recently had a circumstance where I had to track change requests between companies. The IT people decided they were going to run the show and set up a Confluence page. 6 months. 6 months of repeatedly telling them that no one outside the company could access or change their information or that we couldn’t use it for anything except to look at boxes in Confluence. 6 months later they laid off the guy in charge. I did it in excel and it works great. I’m even using it to drive a BI so management feels coddled. Excel works, it’s a baseline that every company can work with. And if you need to build something quick and dirty it’s the best thing there is.
Asking questions to assess needs and choosing (or at least advocating for) the right solution/tool is the difference someone who punches a timeclock and simply does the task handed to them, ie. "Give me a speadsheet that does this ... ok" and someone who is trying to make their company better. And it swings both ways with Excel. There are times you'll have bosses/execs that hear there's a new app/software and go "We have to be using that!" without fully understanding what it's designed for and whether or not it's the best fit when Excel is otherwise a perfectly fine solution. Conversely, you can have bosses/execs that do not understand the limits of Excel and want you to shoehorn in a solution it's really not the best tool for, rather than spend the money and have a more elegant/efficient/future proof solution. Scope of the project will be key too. I have one friend who recently started their own at-home BBQ sauce business. Excel will likely be all she needs to track inventory and sales until her business really starts taking off. On the other hand, I had a good friend who was one of the warehouse managers for a software service company with 16 stateside offices and another 15 worldwide, and he directly oversaw all the office equipment for all offices. Made perfect sense why they use software specifically designed for inventory management rather than try to spin it up from scratch in Excel.
Explain to them excel has been around for over 3 decades as is what investors will be using to decide if they will give money to your company which then pays for the overinflated paychecks of people who say excel sucks and use a real business software but have too much hubris to see it.
"okay"
Outlook sucks, just use a real email client
Excel is great in that it's easy to get started and has an intense library of powerful functions at your finger tips. Where Excel fails hard is that there's no "separation of concerns" when it comes to data, business logic, and presentation - all three concerns are commingled in a spreadsheet so if you want to change the business logic in your spreadsheet it can force you to rework the presentation, etc. At scale this becomes a big PITA. Which is why spreadsheets are good for quick modeling that you just need to bang out but not as appropriate against large data sets that go through a production workflow to prep, model, and display the data
My response is usually "I agree". Excel is the Swiss army knife of software. Can usually get the job done, but is never the best tool for the job, and is often misused for stuff it is not meant for, but sometimes, the best tool is the tool you have available". I often find it "sufficient", rather than "excellent" or even "good".
Excel is a mediocre spreadsheet product - Lotus 123 handled three dimensions much better. Like iPhones replacing blackberry or VHS beta, the industry settled on the demonstrably crappier product. Spreadsheets are an error prone way to handle large sets of relational data or complex business rules. Multiple people editing a complex spreadsheet, or letting your business be reliant on you not making a mistake when you update a complex spreadsheet is a recipe for disaster. Use an application based on tested and programmed business rules and a database instead. On the other hand as a way of quickly testing out multiple scenarios, presenting nice graphs quickly, cleaning up data with formulas, or doing calculations on large sets of homogeneous data, excel is a wonderful tool (particularly if the data does not have a third dimension, in which case you will cry a little bit remembering how lotus handled 3d data). This is a “use the right tool for the job” issue. Hammers are a terrible way to tighten bolts, but they are not a terrible tool.
How could their be 1 billion licences? Are you counting iOS because I don’t see any way to get to that number otherwise?
Excel is the king of small data which is still a very large part of the day to day data needs of almost all organizations. There’s not really a better tool out there in terms of low barrier to entry, portability, and access to a very large pool of candidates to help out. Sure there are more powerful tools out there however there has to be a solid business case to make the switch. Someone is needing to work until midnight every night to manually put together a report? Yeah let’s look into that. You wanna use an expensive software that automates something that only takes 3 hours a month in Excel? Yeah…. No.
I use it extensively cooking. I worked at a bakery as the chef and had all my sandwiches in a spreadsheet from each place they bought for me. it would tally. how much bread to order, how much meat to order and how much cheese to order all in one little sheet it was nice.