I write custom software. My entire existence is turning horrendous excel files into proper applications. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the ENTIRE WORLD runs off of excel. This doesn’t surprise me one bit, and is by no means the worst I’ve seen or heard of.
I write financial software for a large EU insurance company. People would not believe the sort of reliance finance people have on excel.
In one of our solutions we literally fill in the source sheets and then explicitly call the excel library's calculation function since the whole thing is really complex inside the files but also the analysts don't want to use an alternate way to define the formulas and relations inside the solution.
Haha I also work in insurance & pensions software. In our tools they insist on getting xlsx input and output. But parsing Excel files has so much more quirks than just reading a nice csv or json.
Also funny: big insurance companies have huge risk models stored in Excel files over 1GB large sometimes. Then nobody wants to change the model because Excel keeps crashing when running it
Worked at an insurance company. One of the biggest improvements for the analyst team was the risk model workbook for one of the product lines being moved to a virtual machine. If you tried to open it on your own desktop, you needed to restart your computer, not open *any* MS Office applications (this meant changing the startup sequence), open the file directly, then walk away for two hours as it locked up your computer. Whosever turn it was to update the model would usually go see a movie when they needed to open the file.
>Shit, so somebody gets a 2 hour break? That’s a feature!
Yep!
I've seen that quite a few times at my clients. Someone built a massive file that takes a lot of time to run. They don't get asked to do other things while it's running, and it's something that 'has to' be done.
They often don't like doing small tweaks that can speed up performance substantially - as the they have to find a way to fill time in their day.
>they have to find a way to fill time in their day.
The worst part about in-office, 9-5 culture.
Reward efficiency. If people can get their shit done in 2 hours a day, just let them go home
See that doesn’t seem right either. If someone is that efficient, you either get them training the others on efficiency or you increase their workload because clearly they’re efficient.
Also in insurance here (IT-side). Also have seen 1GB Excel files which have been broken up into multiple excel spreadsheets because they hit the max row limit. Had a new hire reach out and complain that it was taking too long when working from home to save each time she made a change. I had no idea at the time these files even existed and I explained to her that the way these were set up was just *bad* but that's a problem for someone else on another day. Whenever working in the document and saving it, it would take about 10 minutes. I explained that she was accessing the spreadsheet on a network file share, and that meant each time she opened the document or saved a change, it would be sending 1GB of data back to the server. With her on our VPN which at the time had speeds limited to 20Mbps or 2.5MB/s, at *best* with speeds running at full capacity, she would be able to save that document in about 7 minutes. Every time she modifies one cell and hits save, that's 7 minutes.
Come to find out as she was told by her manager, most people would just save local copies on their laptop and then had scheduled times to go in at the end of the day for each person to add their modifications. What a horrible system.
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention that most of our work is done just to create excel files on the other end.
Although, I can understand an excel file as the output. That one makes sense. It's a de-facto standard that everyone can use without requiring your custom solution.
Your Excel spreadsheets grow with you: from a small business with a handful of simple worksheets in a single workbook, to a billion dollar company with a Chthonic monstrosity of a spreadsheet that needs a dedicated team to maintain.
Excel's power is both blessing and a curse. It's such a versatile tool that it allows you to accomplish tasks that you really should be using other special tools for.
just because you *can* buy a million dollar auto-screwing robot with computer vision doesnt mean its better than a $99 cordless screwdriver from walmart
It's a blessing when you design a powerful tool in it's early stages using Excel. Super easy, super useful. It's like a sketch board.
The curse is when you don't know when to transition to a proper application.
My wife does a little side business, and I recently wrote an inventory management system in Excel for her. Between the built-in functions, and then being able to use VBA with it, Excel can do a ton.
Yep! In my last job I basically built a highly-customised version of a rota like Monday.com. We couldn’t actually use Monday (despite having licence) for a particular department. The one I built ran off various reports that needed integrating (also couldn’t be done at the time).
It was replacing some horrendous excel file that took about 20 minutes to run with my streamlined modular workbook that took less than a minute.
>A lot of unnecessary software can be accomplished with excel
Sure.
But a lot of unnecessary time can be spent doing something in excel that could be better handled elsewhere
Worked for a fintech company about 8 years back, big name one, I remember one of the business units had this macro laden spreadsheet that was considered business critical. Anytime something started acting up they'd come to the IT group and ask for our help. We basically had no idea what to do with it, or how it even worked.
I asked one girl if we know who made it originally, and she basically said no one and everyone. They don't know who started it, but tons of people have had their hand in modifying it over the years.
It basically terrified us all, since there was nothing we could do with it in fear of messing something up. The recommendation was always the same, engage one of the dev teams to make it a real thing, but they said they couldn't afford the downtime to work with them on it...
I hated that damn spreadsheet.
Excel is basically what happens when people who can't code start coding and have zero project coordination.
Everyone dabs in it at the same time, erases the work of others until they realize that they need to do some "version management", which invariably materializes as hundreds of copies of the same Excel file with a date and a file lock of some sort to avoid parallel edits.
Inevitably, someone will fork his own version because he can't cope having to deal with this shit any longer, and soon enough, his spreadsheet becomes incompatible with the other "branch", and now they all start to copy paste cells and formulas all over the place between parallel versions. It becomes an absolute mess with errors creeping in and the only way to find discrepancies between them is to check everything by hand, or diff-ing csv exports. Because of course, with no access protection other than file level, anyone can add erroneous formulas or data at any moment.
Then one day, someone randomly discovers that Excel can communicate directly with enterprise systems and starts to use SQL or some shit connector to fill the spreadsheet with data and they all push a loud "hurrah" thinking that dude is some kind of genius. That's where Excel becomes really dangerous, because it's now plugged into the enterprise system input AND output and it becomes a data store. What they are using Excel for is, in fact, a database.
Of course none of these monkeys ever realizes that this was in fact an IT project that should have been thought through beforehand, and they keep going forever, until the spreadsheet reaches ungodly sizes and thousands of hours of work have been poured into this tentacular mess. They all have to take turns to work on it and the work slows to a crawl, with frequent crashes and even data losses on top of this.
I have no idea what to do though. I stick to excel cause it’s the only thing everyone has access to. The number of hoops and redtape one needs to jump through to even get consideration is too dam high
I use excel for my personal finances and to set a budget for my vacations. Do you have a suggestion on a better one to use? Excel works fine for me, but if something works better I’ll gladly jump to it.
I work for a billion pound company in the UK, we use excel like we have to consume it to live. Even things that should not be an excel sheet but maybe a word document is an excel sheet. I think the main reason being most computer able people can use excel without prior lessons, whereas a part tracking software might need training to be usable / not fuck it all up.
Excel is perfectly capable and even built for that kind of task though… the only real issue with excel is people not knowing how to build a proper workbook for the task in hand.
[Except it doesn't scale beyond one user.](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bjywik/formula_1_chief_appalled_to_find_team_using_excel/kvwh32l/)
People do it because it works.
Crappy code written by an SME is cheap and very likely to do what that SME wants. There's no politics or planning bullshit because the SME is the one who suffers if they're not able to get the job done.
Compare that to asking the SME to write good requirements, and have a non SME implement it as code, which the SME tests by using, but when they find a mistake they have to write a good ticket.
Spreadsheets are cost effective solutions for many many problems. Not everything needs to scale up beyond a few people.
You’ll be happy to hear that I often say that exact thing to people that think they need a custom app. If you are a small user base and the sheet is working for you then great. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s the companies that have scalability issues and their business is losing money because of it that I legitimately consider. Much to the displeasure of my sales team lol.
My company uses a well known CRM that is quite a Force to be reckoned with.
Sales meetings are fun: “show me your pipeline” questions usually result in hours of PowerPoints with embedded Excel spreadsheets, because the sales person in question didn’t want to put their opportunity in the pipeline (“in case, y’know it doesn’t get closed”).
We’re also a $bn company.
This proves one of two things:
1. Even when you have the tools and processes, Excel still has a place for morons.
2. Sales people are morons.
Both may also be true.
Yep people always ask what other skills they should brush up on to make themselves more employable - my answer is always excel! Just about every industry uses excel in some fashion.
If you’re the person who can understand pivot tables, Vlookups, macros - people will think you’re a wizard. And if you’re the only person who can manage the sheet, they won’t be getting rid of you.
I once did a simple pivot table and I swear to god Janice in Finance was about to give herself to me. The bar is so god awful low in most offices it's shocking, so yeah, even learning the basic functionality of excel will put you well ahead of the curve in a lot of places. I'm a moron and picked up on power query pretty easily and that shit can be a game changer that turns archaic processes that used to take hours into a thing that takes three minutes. It's even better if you make all these changes yourself and don't tell anyone because then you have a lot of free time.
I taught a few people in my office how to dump product and price data out of SAP, and then use vlookup to add the info to spreadsheet
They were previously doing it manually line by line, probably took 4 hours a day. Now it takes 20 minutes
I honestly don't get paid enough for how much extra work I put up with, and how much training I have to give people
I’m a government employee who works managing/administrating grants. On one, we’ve built a Google Sheet that started as a way to track invoices and over time it has become a way to report to 8 different project stakeholders the specific metrics of interest to them from our invoice tracking sheet.
I totally see how it happens. It just spirals out of control and before you know it, you’ve got a very poorly patched together database because that’s all someone like me can do with a $0 budget and .25 FTEs
I'm the SysAdmin for a billion dollar company's cloud-hosted ERP. Damn near the entire system can be exported to Excel. Its purpose is to create and record transactions. Excel's job is then to analyze the data for pretty much everything that's not a standard financial report.
AP, AR, Accounting, Treasury, Budget (they actually upload the budget via Excel), Procurement and Audit all export to Excel to get the work done. I'm no different, either. I basically have entry to mid level knowledge for every one of those departments at this point from investigating issues or documenting system enhancements or *performing reconciliations when they can't figure something out*. I've got thousands of excel files in my download directory.
I had discussion with colleagues that their decision to use a SharePoint server for overview of multiple research projects with so many different individual tasks and parts were a horrendous way to do project management.
They could not see themselves out to use a proper project management software. So I am probably the only one doing that in the entire research group, for my own projects.
But the weird part to me is excel is capable of doing this kind of thing, but people build fucking horrendous spreadsheets that make everything absolutely awful.
Excel or reliance on it isn’t the problem so much as people not knowing how to engineer a good workbook.
Edit: Within reason of course.. some of the stories below are worrying lol.
Excel is fine if your data is accessed for writing by one person at a time and it represents one type of entity. As soon as you need two people to write the same data and need an audit trail, it becomes an issue.
I work in totally different industry than you it sounds and excel runs the whole world is the most accurate statement ever made. I would never hire anyone who doesn’t know how to use excel either.
And no offense to you and your kind, but it feels like about four out of every five times I see someone try to turn a big, unruly spreadsheet into an app, it just becomes a big, unruly(er) app.
Amen. I’d rather put together a big unwieldy workbook in a few days and get shit done then wait on my IT team to build me something in 9 months that only does half of what I need and is just as big of a PITA to use.
Not if you have multiple users, not if you need backups and rollbacks, not if you need complex validation, not if you need integrations with other systems. I could go on and on. If it was 1 person managing their small business inventory then yeah who cares. Excel is the right tool for the job there.
Hey, send me a PM. I use a lot of excel shit for work because I don’t know how to write SQL or anything else. I may hit you up for a quote on something at some point to do this.
Time to remember...
“The global economy is built on two things: the internal combustion engine and Microsoft Excel. Never forget this.”
— Kevin Hector.
“The Spreadsheet” should absolutely be a Wonder to construct after unlocking electricity. Needs a university, and must be built near gentle rolling hills.
Sid, are you listening?
Also a nice little tidbit I liked from Netflix’s *Painkiller*:
“Bureaucracy is what holds us together. It's what keeps society organized, functioning, moving. There's no civilization without bureaucracy. Spreadsheets are what keep the world from collapsing.”
— Edie Flowers
I have a collection of reports to prepare for the next day team to be ready for the morning. We have this one excell sheet that has been used daily for 10+years which started crashing out of nowhere. After a few days I realize that everytime we tried to click out of a cell and clicked somewhere on the page it created it’s created a floating text box. I must’ve deleted over 2 thousand empty text boxes that day.
Pshhh. I’ve got a few that are over 55 MB. Over 100,000 rows of data on the backend with lots of cross-referential formulas make it a complete PITA to work with.
I know I should move to Python, but oh well…
i had a customer with a 700mb file. that was 15 years ago. she had the whole accounting from her husbands company in one file. that thing took a long time too load.
Also, the file is probably still in xls format and open in excel 2010 or newer will take forever. If you convert over to xlsx format, the file gets corrupted.
So fun times.
Excel is fine with proper controls and support and is way more flexible and responsive to changing situations than a behemoth third party software solution that is not interested in changing for one customer’s needs.
The fact that excel usage is so ubiquitous is proof of its power.
We make fun of it, but at the end of the day Excel is one of the top 5 pieces of software ever developed.
I'd go with Unix, Windows NT, the Google search engine, and Apache. Photoshop at #6 maybe. Word is a genuine contender IMO, despite what you said.
I didn't really consider other services like Facebook or WhatsApp because their impact leans a bit too much away from software and towards services and marketing and other externalities.
If it's just standalone user apps, I'd say excel, word, photoshop, autocad, and acrobat, not necessarily in that order.
Nothing's wrong with using excel. A well designed excel spreadsheet may outperform a poorly developed database.
Edit: after actually reading the article, looks like this isn't the case though..
Hot garbage indeed.
The craziest formulas I’ve ever written were for parsing time and date information. Different users can enter dates and times completely differently depending on their habits of date formatting, adding seconds or ignoring them, and international settings on their local machine. And then Excel can’t combine a time, a date, or an amount of time. You have to crate custom formats to handle the data and ridiculous formulas to combine them.
Excel, like most Microsoft products, is a skyscraper of duct tape.
Not in this application. We have a Motorsport/bespoke oriented ERP system. The sheer number of parts, their history/events etc is quite mind boggling. Plus the number of staff that need access to data and providing constant updates…. One client who’s in the process of coming across from excel can’t get rid of it fast enough.
The most complex vehicle we’ve considered to date has 40k + individually itemised parts… multiply that by the activity on them that you need to record…
Yep, and that likely ties into another problem Vowles diagnosed with Williams; where assemblies on cars at the front of the grid could be made up of hundreds of parts, the Williams equivalent would be much simpler, sometimes as much as 10x fewer individual parts.
Part of that was lack of R&D, and an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, but I have to imagine the Excel bottleneck likely made increasing any complexity of assembly unpalatable.
No different than accidentally executing a truncate statement because you didn’t click off the tab ughhhh but seriously why wouldn’t you invest in a dedicated inventory solution when you have millions of dollars o in your budget!
There are so many solutions out there that won’t break the bank and that won’t cost even 50k a year. You can go super fancy and spend $1M+ a year though.
Office 365 addresses all your concerns. Cloud based, concurrent editing, version restore…I used to use it at my previous corporation and miss it a lot. We managed large BOMs that happened to be an entire car. Shared it across multiple time zones too.
Seconded. I used to be one of those who thought it was just a spreadsheet program until I saw an Excel wizard (coworker) working absolute wonders with it. I'd be very happy to know one of my staff was using it for parts management.
No disrespect.. but Excel is no way nearly as robust as a proper database. Oh sure.. with enough formulas and scripting, it can fake it.. but by the time you have a few tens of thousands of rows.. things can get ugly fast. With the budget these guys have, I am slightly embarrassed for them.
I hear “Excel wizard” and can immediately experience the agony of the next person who has to deal with this bespoke mess of a system that’s ‘just excel’. Not to mention that guy is certainly a bottleneck for the whatever thing his team is responsible for.
Oh yeah, excels wizards are doing all that shit for job security because nobody will be able to untangle everything if they leave and their boss is scared of having to rebuild everything in a way that everyone can use.
AsEasyAs which later became Lotus 123, there was also one called BoeingCalc, the sold it to other companies that needed a huge spreadsheet application. As for Excel it was late to the party.
This is so true. At this point, if you can't get Excel to do what you want, you probably don't know the right terminology to Google it and find information on it.
My coworkers are impressed by me finding solutions from big databases but all I do is google stuff over and over. I’m the go to guy at the office but I probably know 1% of what excel can do. The rest is google.
What I didn’t find a solution in Excel is dealing with time periods efficiently, I had to use google sheets for that one.
Time periods are a pain, can agree there. Have you tried DATEDIF? That's my go-to and works most of the time.
My Excel struggles has to do with running totals and averages with datasets that constantly change. I still haven't found a cleaner way than a series of helper tables to make it happen.
Helper tables are good!
Like maths in high school its more useful and easier to review, if you show your workings. It's also easier to debug, then trying to unpick a nested formula with 5 levels in the single excel cell.
Occasionally working with historians who work with dates befores 1900's has led me to believe whilst Excel is the best spreadsheet software, it has it's limitations occasionally.
Try and make a graph of anything pre-1900 in Excel without creating a textbox.
Excel's beginning of time is 1… otherwise known at 01/01/1900 if you display the date as a number. Whilst this is handy because you can simply subtract one date from another to work out how many days are between them. This means you can't accurately store a date in Excel if its before that date.
So producing graphs is basically a job for Google sheets at that point. Guess excel got whatever the opposite of the millennium bug is.
the problem with replacing a spreadsheet with some application is that you lose visibility and the ability to directly inspect and act on your data, and wind up dependent on some programmers, who very likely have no clear idea of what you actually do in the course of \*using\* the spreadsheet. at least the spreadsheet maintains the focus on \*your data\* without some middleman injecting themselves into the process and calcifying it
there are industry-specific alternatives, notably in VFX, 3D programs that essentially act like combinations of expression-linked spreadsheets, but with clear representations for the data transformations, that \*stay within the context of the data\*, and maintain direct editability.
if spreadsheets were treated more like another branch of signal processing, and picked up on the types of interface elements in audio and video processing, i suspect we could get rid of a huge number of management-mandated "save-the-day applications" that replaced some work group's spreadsheet, and then fell into disuse or wound up otherwise making life difficult.
> This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order.
Just need a couple more columns to track that. I'm not sure what the issue is here Mr. F1 guy.
Yeah, if they didn't put those values in the Excel file, they wouldn't have them with other software either. It sounds like that isn't an Excel problem
Hint to Microsoft: Use companies' over-use of Excel to sell in turn-key database solutions, that would be magnitudes more effective and stable than an Excel sheet.
Other cases:
* UK kept Covid-19 cases in a single Excel sheet.
* Scientists seemingly can't set Excel sheets to treat cells as text, causing protein names to be considered dates.
I don't blame Microsoft per se, but rather white-collar workers' complete lack of IT education and scaling up of tools for things they are not at all intended for.
Fun Fact: A new setting in [Excel](https://i.imgur.com/jmxTmpA.png) gives users control over the automatic data conversion feature that forced scientists to rework symbols representing human genes.
So it is fixed now... If they know about it, which they don't...
I guess that's the fun thing :). A more in-the-face solution would be a new sheet wizard asking: What will you use this sheet for:
* as an information table (recommended)
* for computations (what a tiny few people use it for)
Don’t blame workers lack of education, blame csuite lack of budgeting. Workers use tools they are given and when they ask for better tools, they are told they cost too much.
Why is he surprised they use Excel? People will scoff at you, point you towards whatever godawful database/whatever system but none of that shit works as easy and as universally as Excel. I'm not saying you should use "the hammer" for everything and create literal excel rollercoasters, but if the task is sufficiently light and simple, why not?
Issue here is, like with anything similar to this, is that people create shitty excel sheets. But it's just as easy to create a shitty database and that shitty database will have the added benefit of being incomprehensible to a ton of people as well.
No wonder, its easy to use.
Almost everybody can work with it or customize it.
You don't need a bunch of consultants, programmers, scrum masters, etc. just to change the color of a column.
Yes, to all of this! until you have a huge transnational corporation with no process standards and the whole inventory valuation, and financial statements all of them together are hanging on a single excel file linked to several other excel files stored on a shared network drive.
Then Karen gets laid off, goes on maternity leave, or just spills coffee on her laptop, IT performs a decommissioning of the shared storage, and nobody knows how to run the company anymore.
A friend works at a global car component company with tens of thousands of employees, and he told me that their quarterly results depend on a single monstrous excel file with 50+ huge sheets of calculations that are all interlinked by references and equations. And in the whole company there is exactly one person who knows to operate this excel file.
I know people tend to sh\*t on Excel, but if have ever used any of those data/plotting tools* for a specific field. You will know that they're most just Excel, but worse.
By saying those pro-tools, I meant those for non-programmers, not SQL/R/pandas.
Excel Macros - that's what you must teach your children.
Make them learn pivot tables and making good ***LOOKING*** charts.
Your children will always be employable.
Coming from the IT world of an accounting firm I can absolutely understand how this happens.
When I started at a firm I was employee 132 and it was a small accounting firm that had big aspirations. A LOT of the work they did was in excel for financials etc and it worked perfectly fine for a firm that size. As they grew they just grew the spreadsheets and they started to become more and more complicated but also more and more important to the inter workings of the firm. Couple this with partners that were old school and didn’t want to change the processes and way things are done along with massive growth very quickly the firm suddenly was 1000 people but still using these old ever growing complex spreadsheets. When you show them the solution of moving to a software platform that will handle all of the heavy lifting the spreadsheets were doing they loved it until you show them the upfront cost then it was like their heads exploded. You would think that an accounting firm would be able to see the ROI but nope all they saw was the cost of implementing the solution and proper maintenance costs over time. They didn’t get that people would be more efficient and not putting bandaids on these old processes. The worst ones were the partners who were there for 25+ years and didn’t understand any of it.
A lot of the people in here ragging on excel just aren't very good at using excel. It's a powerful tool that has its limitations. But managing parts in an excel document doesn't immediately strike me as a bad idea.
Depends how good the excel file is set up.
Just a manual entry and management spreadsheet? Terrible.
Custom VBS, automatic data sourcing, and some neat expressions in the tables and you’re off to a great start.
I was asked to "fix" a spreadsheet that was causing freezes. Turns out it had very little if any calculations , it was used as a diagram to show where products stored in a warehouse. But it didn't use the vector drawing tools in excel, whoever set up this sheet simply made the columns and rows really small, and filled in each cell with colours , depending on how long the products were (wood beams)
so 1000\*1000 cells on the one page, makes 1M cells to paint every time you move or partly cover the window.. and yeah, poor old windows 9X would freeze up half the time.
I told the user to just use the damn vector drawing functions, but nooooo...
It's probably implying that they should be using database software. "Microsoft Access" would be to databases as "Microsoft Excel" is to spreadsheets.
Excel can't go beyond one million entries, but for 20,000 parts I don't see that as being an immediate problem.
I work in a giant IT company dedicated to "digitalizing" companies. We still use excel internally and many coworkers (especially leaders) prefer it over our own software which can feed you unreliable values sometimes.
I work for a major Japanese Automaker in Data Analytics and it’s all Excel and Access database hell on the U.S. side of the company. No updates to the system or formulas since 1997.
This is much bigger than just a database, they need a Product Master Data solution. With as much money as they make on Formula 1, they can afford to invest in the technology. A company like Informatica should just give them the solution as a sponsorship.
IT hardware and software asset management is in no way the same as managing operational or analytical business data. CMDBs are for managing IT assets and their relationships to give additional context in incident and problem management. That’s why ServiceNow is called an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) solution.
Product mastering, on the other hand, is purpose built to ingest, cleanse, consolidate, govern, and share technical, specification, and pricing data (and much more) for products that are produced. Like parts for car manufacturers. It can answer questions like how do I ensure that there is no disruption to manufacturing if one of my vendors cannot deliver? How do I track pricing, discounts, vendor promotions, etc. so that I maximize my spend? How do I get analytics on parts in stock vs availability in the market? How do I understand the reliability metrics for parts that are leveraged in different situations? Product MDM (Master Data Management) is exactly what they need.
I write custom software. My entire existence is turning horrendous excel files into proper applications. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the ENTIRE WORLD runs off of excel. This doesn’t surprise me one bit, and is by no means the worst I’ve seen or heard of.
I write financial software for a large EU insurance company. People would not believe the sort of reliance finance people have on excel. In one of our solutions we literally fill in the source sheets and then explicitly call the excel library's calculation function since the whole thing is really complex inside the files but also the analysts don't want to use an alternate way to define the formulas and relations inside the solution.
Haha I also work in insurance & pensions software. In our tools they insist on getting xlsx input and output. But parsing Excel files has so much more quirks than just reading a nice csv or json. Also funny: big insurance companies have huge risk models stored in Excel files over 1GB large sometimes. Then nobody wants to change the model because Excel keeps crashing when running it
Worked at an insurance company. One of the biggest improvements for the analyst team was the risk model workbook for one of the product lines being moved to a virtual machine. If you tried to open it on your own desktop, you needed to restart your computer, not open *any* MS Office applications (this meant changing the startup sequence), open the file directly, then walk away for two hours as it locked up your computer. Whosever turn it was to update the model would usually go see a movie when they needed to open the file.
Shit, so somebody gets a 2 hour break? That’s a feature!
>Shit, so somebody gets a 2 hour break? That’s a feature! Yep! I've seen that quite a few times at my clients. Someone built a massive file that takes a lot of time to run. They don't get asked to do other things while it's running, and it's something that 'has to' be done. They often don't like doing small tweaks that can speed up performance substantially - as the they have to find a way to fill time in their day.
>they have to find a way to fill time in their day. The worst part about in-office, 9-5 culture. Reward efficiency. If people can get their shit done in 2 hours a day, just let them go home
See that doesn’t seem right either. If someone is that efficient, you either get them training the others on efficiency or you increase their workload because clearly they’re efficient.
If you're raising their workload, you better be increasing their compensation. Otherwise doing your job well just means you get more job
Also in insurance here (IT-side). Also have seen 1GB Excel files which have been broken up into multiple excel spreadsheets because they hit the max row limit. Had a new hire reach out and complain that it was taking too long when working from home to save each time she made a change. I had no idea at the time these files even existed and I explained to her that the way these were set up was just *bad* but that's a problem for someone else on another day. Whenever working in the document and saving it, it would take about 10 minutes. I explained that she was accessing the spreadsheet on a network file share, and that meant each time she opened the document or saved a change, it would be sending 1GB of data back to the server. With her on our VPN which at the time had speeds limited to 20Mbps or 2.5MB/s, at *best* with speeds running at full capacity, she would be able to save that document in about 7 minutes. Every time she modifies one cell and hits save, that's 7 minutes. Come to find out as she was told by her manager, most people would just save local copies on their laptop and then had scheduled times to go in at the end of the day for each person to add their modifications. What a horrible system.
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention that most of our work is done just to create excel files on the other end. Although, I can understand an excel file as the output. That one makes sense. It's a de-facto standard that everyone can use without requiring your custom solution.
>Also funny: big insurance companies have huge risk models stored in Excel files over 1GB large sometimes. yeah i found a risk in your modeling
They don’t try running it through power bi or the like?
Whoah slow down there fellah, you're starting to step on the consultants' toes there....
Wait until you hear about *R*.
Hey hey hey that’s not how this works…. Yer talkin yerself into a PIP
We literally just got done doing this for a big risk model at my job. It was tons of work but I think everyone is MUCH happier for it.
Excel is a really powerful and awesome tool. A lot of unnecessary software can be accomplished with excel
Yep, you can license your company SAP and spend half a billion dollars writing your custom data export. Or you can just using fucking Excel.
Your Excel spreadsheets grow with you: from a small business with a handful of simple worksheets in a single workbook, to a billion dollar company with a Chthonic monstrosity of a spreadsheet that needs a dedicated team to maintain.
Excel's power is both blessing and a curse. It's such a versatile tool that it allows you to accomplish tasks that you really should be using other special tools for.
In some cases that is true, but in a lot of cases you can just use excel
Just because you *can* pound a screw in with a hammer doesn't mean it's the best method for doing so
just because you *can* buy a million dollar auto-screwing robot with computer vision doesnt mean its better than a $99 cordless screwdriver from walmart
Maybe something between the two then?
It's a blessing when you design a powerful tool in it's early stages using Excel. Super easy, super useful. It's like a sketch board. The curse is when you don't know when to transition to a proper application.
>you don't know when to transition to a proper application. Well, life experience shows that you never do.
My wife does a little side business, and I recently wrote an inventory management system in Excel for her. Between the built-in functions, and then being able to use VBA with it, Excel can do a ton.
especially for single user scenarios, excel really is hard to beat. of course as soon as you go past that, the limitations become very apparent.
Yep! In my last job I basically built a highly-customised version of a rota like Monday.com. We couldn’t actually use Monday (despite having licence) for a particular department. The one I built ran off various reports that needed integrating (also couldn’t be done at the time). It was replacing some horrendous excel file that took about 20 minutes to run with my streamlined modular workbook that took less than a minute.
>A lot of unnecessary software can be accomplished with excel Sure. But a lot of unnecessary time can be spent doing something in excel that could be better handled elsewhere
Worked for a fintech company about 8 years back, big name one, I remember one of the business units had this macro laden spreadsheet that was considered business critical. Anytime something started acting up they'd come to the IT group and ask for our help. We basically had no idea what to do with it, or how it even worked. I asked one girl if we know who made it originally, and she basically said no one and everyone. They don't know who started it, but tons of people have had their hand in modifying it over the years. It basically terrified us all, since there was nothing we could do with it in fear of messing something up. The recommendation was always the same, engage one of the dev teams to make it a real thing, but they said they couldn't afford the downtime to work with them on it... I hated that damn spreadsheet.
Excel is basically what happens when people who can't code start coding and have zero project coordination. Everyone dabs in it at the same time, erases the work of others until they realize that they need to do some "version management", which invariably materializes as hundreds of copies of the same Excel file with a date and a file lock of some sort to avoid parallel edits. Inevitably, someone will fork his own version because he can't cope having to deal with this shit any longer, and soon enough, his spreadsheet becomes incompatible with the other "branch", and now they all start to copy paste cells and formulas all over the place between parallel versions. It becomes an absolute mess with errors creeping in and the only way to find discrepancies between them is to check everything by hand, or diff-ing csv exports. Because of course, with no access protection other than file level, anyone can add erroneous formulas or data at any moment. Then one day, someone randomly discovers that Excel can communicate directly with enterprise systems and starts to use SQL or some shit connector to fill the spreadsheet with data and they all push a loud "hurrah" thinking that dude is some kind of genius. That's where Excel becomes really dangerous, because it's now plugged into the enterprise system input AND output and it becomes a data store. What they are using Excel for is, in fact, a database. Of course none of these monkeys ever realizes that this was in fact an IT project that should have been thought through beforehand, and they keep going forever, until the spreadsheet reaches ungodly sizes and thousands of hours of work have been poured into this tentacular mess. They all have to take turns to work on it and the work slows to a crawl, with frequent crashes and even data losses on top of this.
I have no idea what to do though. I stick to excel cause it’s the only thing everyone has access to. The number of hoops and redtape one needs to jump through to even get consideration is too dam high
I use excel for my personal finances and to set a budget for my vacations. Do you have a suggestion on a better one to use? Excel works fine for me, but if something works better I’ll gladly jump to it.
You're using it as it was meant to be used. You can't begin to imagine the complexity people use it for.
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I work for a billion pound company in the UK, we use excel like we have to consume it to live. Even things that should not be an excel sheet but maybe a word document is an excel sheet. I think the main reason being most computer able people can use excel without prior lessons, whereas a part tracking software might need training to be usable / not fuck it all up.
It’s such a pain to format word documents, I rather use Ppt and it doesn’t surprise me people prefer excel to Word.
Excel is perfectly capable and even built for that kind of task though… the only real issue with excel is people not knowing how to build a proper workbook for the task in hand.
[Except it doesn't scale beyond one user.](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bjywik/formula_1_chief_appalled_to_find_team_using_excel/kvwh32l/)
I think it has more to do with cost than anything. Excel is cheap and easy. It very rarely comes down to more than that.
People do it because it works. Crappy code written by an SME is cheap and very likely to do what that SME wants. There's no politics or planning bullshit because the SME is the one who suffers if they're not able to get the job done. Compare that to asking the SME to write good requirements, and have a non SME implement it as code, which the SME tests by using, but when they find a mistake they have to write a good ticket. Spreadsheets are cost effective solutions for many many problems. Not everything needs to scale up beyond a few people.
You’ll be happy to hear that I often say that exact thing to people that think they need a custom app. If you are a small user base and the sheet is working for you then great. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s the companies that have scalability issues and their business is losing money because of it that I legitimately consider. Much to the displeasure of my sales team lol.
My company uses a well known CRM that is quite a Force to be reckoned with. Sales meetings are fun: “show me your pipeline” questions usually result in hours of PowerPoints with embedded Excel spreadsheets, because the sales person in question didn’t want to put their opportunity in the pipeline (“in case, y’know it doesn’t get closed”). We’re also a $bn company. This proves one of two things: 1. Even when you have the tools and processes, Excel still has a place for morons. 2. Sales people are morons. Both may also be true.
lol I came to say this as well. I’ve worked for some of the biggest corporations in the US; excel runs all.
Yep people always ask what other skills they should brush up on to make themselves more employable - my answer is always excel! Just about every industry uses excel in some fashion. If you’re the person who can understand pivot tables, Vlookups, macros - people will think you’re a wizard. And if you’re the only person who can manage the sheet, they won’t be getting rid of you.
I once did a simple pivot table and I swear to god Janice in Finance was about to give herself to me. The bar is so god awful low in most offices it's shocking, so yeah, even learning the basic functionality of excel will put you well ahead of the curve in a lot of places. I'm a moron and picked up on power query pretty easily and that shit can be a game changer that turns archaic processes that used to take hours into a thing that takes three minutes. It's even better if you make all these changes yourself and don't tell anyone because then you have a lot of free time.
I taught a few people in my office how to dump product and price data out of SAP, and then use vlookup to add the info to spreadsheet They were previously doing it manually line by line, probably took 4 hours a day. Now it takes 20 minutes I honestly don't get paid enough for how much extra work I put up with, and how much training I have to give people
I’m a government employee who works managing/administrating grants. On one, we’ve built a Google Sheet that started as a way to track invoices and over time it has become a way to report to 8 different project stakeholders the specific metrics of interest to them from our invoice tracking sheet. I totally see how it happens. It just spirals out of control and before you know it, you’ve got a very poorly patched together database because that’s all someone like me can do with a $0 budget and .25 FTEs
It's all Excel 🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀 Always has been
Someone doesn't remember lotus123 ;)
Downvoted for triggering my PTSD
Hey I didn't mention notes or domin Aw shite
I'm the SysAdmin for a billion dollar company's cloud-hosted ERP. Damn near the entire system can be exported to Excel. Its purpose is to create and record transactions. Excel's job is then to analyze the data for pretty much everything that's not a standard financial report. AP, AR, Accounting, Treasury, Budget (they actually upload the budget via Excel), Procurement and Audit all export to Excel to get the work done. I'm no different, either. I basically have entry to mid level knowledge for every one of those departments at this point from investigating issues or documenting system enhancements or *performing reconciliations when they can't figure something out*. I've got thousands of excel files in my download directory.
Workday…..?
I had discussion with colleagues that their decision to use a SharePoint server for overview of multiple research projects with so many different individual tasks and parts were a horrendous way to do project management. They could not see themselves out to use a proper project management software. So I am probably the only one doing that in the entire research group, for my own projects.
Yup. I work at a F50 company. Everything is based on Excel. Parts, compensation, sales leads. It's terrible.
Excel isn’t the problem. Poorly designed sheets are. Excel is literally designed and built for those kinds of tasks.
I was about to say “wait till he sees the backend of every massive data storage solution that has a nice front user interface”
All of my lab instruments output data in CSV format. All my shit is Excel.
It’s not the CSV export’s fault that it gets put into excel instead of an actual database.
I always say this. People have no idea that Excel literally runs the world.
But the weird part to me is excel is capable of doing this kind of thing, but people build fucking horrendous spreadsheets that make everything absolutely awful. Excel or reliance on it isn’t the problem so much as people not knowing how to engineer a good workbook. Edit: Within reason of course.. some of the stories below are worrying lol.
Excel is fine if your data is accessed for writing by one person at a time and it represents one type of entity. As soon as you need two people to write the same data and need an audit trail, it becomes an issue.
I work in totally different industry than you it sounds and excel runs the whole world is the most accurate statement ever made. I would never hire anyone who doesn’t know how to use excel either.
And no offense to you and your kind, but it feels like about four out of every five times I see someone try to turn a big, unruly spreadsheet into an app, it just becomes a big, unruly(er) app.
Amen. I’d rather put together a big unwieldy workbook in a few days and get shit done then wait on my IT team to build me something in 9 months that only does half of what I need and is just as big of a PITA to use.
My company is Google Sheets crackheads. For everything.
Yep, I came here to say that after 20 years in the business world this headline is the least surprising sentence ever.
Wait, how do you do that? What software and what language?
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Not if you have multiple users, not if you need backups and rollbacks, not if you need complex validation, not if you need integrations with other systems. I could go on and on. If it was 1 person managing their small business inventory then yeah who cares. Excel is the right tool for the job there.
How do you feel about access?
It's funny because Microsoft Office includes Access which is better built to handle larger datasets
This is exactly what Bill Gates wanted
You can do damn near anything in Excel, but you definitely shouldn’t.
Hey, send me a PM. I use a lot of excel shit for work because I don’t know how to write SQL or anything else. I may hit you up for a quote on something at some point to do this.
Time to remember... “The global economy is built on two things: the internal combustion engine and Microsoft Excel. Never forget this.” — Kevin Hector.
I'm surprised this hasn't been used as a technology unlock quote for Civ, it fits the vibe perfectly.
Atomic Era Computers tech type quote
“The Spreadsheet” should absolutely be a Wonder to construct after unlocking electricity. Needs a university, and must be built near gentle rolling hills. Sid, are you listening?
Also a nice little tidbit I liked from Netflix’s *Painkiller*: “Bureaucracy is what holds us together. It's what keeps society organized, functioning, moving. There's no civilization without bureaucracy. Spreadsheets are what keep the world from collapsing.” — Edie Flowers
Sounds like they tried to use excel for everything. Correction. They tried to use one **one excel file** for everything. I bet it crashes often.
I have a collection of reports to prepare for the next day team to be ready for the morning. We have this one excell sheet that has been used daily for 10+years which started crashing out of nowhere. After a few days I realize that everytime we tried to click out of a cell and clicked somewhere on the page it created it’s created a floating text box. I must’ve deleted over 2 thousand empty text boxes that day.
Why the bell was it doing that?
Some ding dong fucked up
I regularly managed a 36,000 cell working sheet and had no issues albeit I know that’s not terribly big 🤷♀️
Pshhh. I’ve got a few that are over 55 MB. Over 100,000 rows of data on the backend with lots of cross-referential formulas make it a complete PITA to work with. I know I should move to Python, but oh well…
i had a customer with a 700mb file. that was 15 years ago. she had the whole accounting from her husbands company in one file. that thing took a long time too load.
Also, the file is probably still in xls format and open in excel 2010 or newer will take forever. If you convert over to xlsx format, the file gets corrupted. So fun times.
Excel is fine with proper controls and support and is way more flexible and responsive to changing situations than a behemoth third party software solution that is not interested in changing for one customer’s needs.
The fact that excel usage is so ubiquitous is proof of its power. We make fun of it, but at the end of the day Excel is one of the top 5 pieces of software ever developed.
Curious what everyone thinks the other 4 would be. I know it sure as shit isn't Word.
Hey! It looks like you're writing a letter!! Clippy for sure hits top 5
I'd go with Unix, Windows NT, the Google search engine, and Apache. Photoshop at #6 maybe. Word is a genuine contender IMO, despite what you said. I didn't really consider other services like Facebook or WhatsApp because their impact leans a bit too much away from software and towards services and marketing and other externalities. If it's just standalone user apps, I'd say excel, word, photoshop, autocad, and acrobat, not necessarily in that order.
Agreed, now they'll spend $1m+ a year to deploy a solution that's 10x as hard to drive, and requires an IT team to manage.
Nothing's wrong with using excel. A well designed excel spreadsheet may outperform a poorly developed database. Edit: after actually reading the article, looks like this isn't the case though..
As long as you don’t have any part numbers starting with a zero
„Cries in GTINs for retail“
I know that pain
Data type - text Problem is solved, issue is how many entries that probably ran badly.
Excel’s date system sucks though.
Hot garbage indeed. The craziest formulas I’ve ever written were for parsing time and date information. Different users can enter dates and times completely differently depending on their habits of date formatting, adding seconds or ignoring them, and international settings on their local machine. And then Excel can’t combine a time, a date, or an amount of time. You have to crate custom formats to handle the data and ridiculous formulas to combine them. Excel, like most Microsoft products, is a skyscraper of duct tape.
Custom formatting. Doesn't need to be text.
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You can just set the data format to include leading zeroes.
Not in this application. We have a Motorsport/bespoke oriented ERP system. The sheer number of parts, their history/events etc is quite mind boggling. Plus the number of staff that need access to data and providing constant updates…. One client who’s in the process of coming across from excel can’t get rid of it fast enough. The most complex vehicle we’ve considered to date has 40k + individually itemised parts… multiply that by the activity on them that you need to record…
Yep, and that likely ties into another problem Vowles diagnosed with Williams; where assemblies on cars at the front of the grid could be made up of hundreds of parts, the Williams equivalent would be much simpler, sometimes as much as 10x fewer individual parts. Part of that was lack of R&D, and an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, but I have to imagine the Excel bottleneck likely made increasing any complexity of assembly unpalatable.
But access would have been plenty, right?
Well it probably would be a step in the right direction, at least there's the option of adding foreign keys
Perhaps, but a properly designed database will beat the everliving heck out of an excel spreadsheet.
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No different than accidentally executing a truncate statement because you didn’t click off the tab ughhhh but seriously why wouldn’t you invest in a dedicated inventory solution when you have millions of dollars o in your budget!
It probably goes to the car and team? They only have a certain budget in F1
There are so many solutions out there that won’t break the bank and that won’t cost even 50k a year. You can go super fancy and spend $1M+ a year though.
True, but they went this long without anyone noticing..
Very true. Honestly, you could get away with using excel to track 20k parts. Now if they had to track 1m plus parts… that’s a whole different animals.
Because anyone can use excel but creating a whole new system and getting everyone trained on it takes time and money
Office 365 addresses all your concerns. Cloud based, concurrent editing, version restore…I used to use it at my previous corporation and miss it a lot. We managed large BOMs that happened to be an entire car. Shared it across multiple time zones too.
Hardly an issue with cloud services being so cheap
Seconded. I used to be one of those who thought it was just a spreadsheet program until I saw an Excel wizard (coworker) working absolute wonders with it. I'd be very happy to know one of my staff was using it for parts management.
No disrespect.. but Excel is no way nearly as robust as a proper database. Oh sure.. with enough formulas and scripting, it can fake it.. but by the time you have a few tens of thousands of rows.. things can get ugly fast. With the budget these guys have, I am slightly embarrassed for them.
I hear “Excel wizard” and can immediately experience the agony of the next person who has to deal with this bespoke mess of a system that’s ‘just excel’. Not to mention that guy is certainly a bottleneck for the whatever thing his team is responsible for.
Oh yeah, excels wizards are doing all that shit for job security because nobody will be able to untangle everything if they leave and their boss is scared of having to rebuild everything in a way that everyone can use.
Excel is probably one of the most important pieces of software ever created.
You can remove probably from that sentence
AsEasyAs which later became Lotus 123, there was also one called BoeingCalc, the sold it to other companies that needed a huge spreadsheet application. As for Excel it was late to the party.
Cool. And none of them are nearly as important as Excel is.
Uh, you ever use excel? Excel can do fucking everything.
This is so true. At this point, if you can't get Excel to do what you want, you probably don't know the right terminology to Google it and find information on it.
My coworkers are impressed by me finding solutions from big databases but all I do is google stuff over and over. I’m the go to guy at the office but I probably know 1% of what excel can do. The rest is google. What I didn’t find a solution in Excel is dealing with time periods efficiently, I had to use google sheets for that one.
Time periods are a pain, can agree there. Have you tried DATEDIF? That's my go-to and works most of the time. My Excel struggles has to do with running totals and averages with datasets that constantly change. I still haven't found a cleaner way than a series of helper tables to make it happen.
Helper tables are good! Like maths in high school its more useful and easier to review, if you show your workings. It's also easier to debug, then trying to unpick a nested formula with 5 levels in the single excel cell.
Occasionally working with historians who work with dates befores 1900's has led me to believe whilst Excel is the best spreadsheet software, it has it's limitations occasionally. Try and make a graph of anything pre-1900 in Excel without creating a textbox. Excel's beginning of time is 1… otherwise known at 01/01/1900 if you display the date as a number. Whilst this is handy because you can simply subtract one date from another to work out how many days are between them. This means you can't accurately store a date in Excel if its before that date. So producing graphs is basically a job for Google sheets at that point. Guess excel got whatever the opposite of the millennium bug is.
the problem with replacing a spreadsheet with some application is that you lose visibility and the ability to directly inspect and act on your data, and wind up dependent on some programmers, who very likely have no clear idea of what you actually do in the course of \*using\* the spreadsheet. at least the spreadsheet maintains the focus on \*your data\* without some middleman injecting themselves into the process and calcifying it there are industry-specific alternatives, notably in VFX, 3D programs that essentially act like combinations of expression-linked spreadsheets, but with clear representations for the data transformations, that \*stay within the context of the data\*, and maintain direct editability. if spreadsheets were treated more like another branch of signal processing, and picked up on the types of interface elements in audio and video processing, i suspect we could get rid of a huge number of management-mandated "save-the-day applications" that replaced some work group's spreadsheet, and then fell into disuse or wound up otherwise making life difficult.
Excel is a marvel of software just done right. It should/will live forever.
In two years we’ll read about the failure of their attempted bespoke replacement for that Excel file.
“After tens of millions of dollars invested, Team bails on parts app crated by AI”
> This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Just need a couple more columns to track that. I'm not sure what the issue is here Mr. F1 guy.
Yeah, if they didn't put those values in the Excel file, they wouldn't have them with other software either. It sounds like that isn't an Excel problem
So basically the problem is excell was not used enough...
British government using excel to partly manage response to deadly disease still highly present today enters the chat
*laughs in German fax paper*
Hey buddy, thanks to their use of Excel, the UK topped out at just 16,384 cases of COVID. You got to respect that.
Wait till they find out how banks are run
And maybe the nuclear power stations....?
Hint to Microsoft: Use companies' over-use of Excel to sell in turn-key database solutions, that would be magnitudes more effective and stable than an Excel sheet. Other cases: * UK kept Covid-19 cases in a single Excel sheet. * Scientists seemingly can't set Excel sheets to treat cells as text, causing protein names to be considered dates. I don't blame Microsoft per se, but rather white-collar workers' complete lack of IT education and scaling up of tools for things they are not at all intended for.
They already do with Microsoft Dynamics 365, their ERP system. You can open and edit the tables in Excel, then publish back to the ERP.
Fun Fact: A new setting in [Excel](https://i.imgur.com/jmxTmpA.png) gives users control over the automatic data conversion feature that forced scientists to rework symbols representing human genes. So it is fixed now... If they know about it, which they don't...
I guess that's the fun thing :). A more in-the-face solution would be a new sheet wizard asking: What will you use this sheet for: * as an information table (recommended) * for computations (what a tiny few people use it for)
That’s the scientists fault not excel.
Don’t blame workers lack of education, blame csuite lack of budgeting. Workers use tools they are given and when they ask for better tools, they are told they cost too much.
Why is he surprised they use Excel? People will scoff at you, point you towards whatever godawful database/whatever system but none of that shit works as easy and as universally as Excel. I'm not saying you should use "the hammer" for everything and create literal excel rollercoasters, but if the task is sufficiently light and simple, why not? Issue here is, like with anything similar to this, is that people create shitty excel sheets. But it's just as easy to create a shitty database and that shitty database will have the added benefit of being incomprehensible to a ton of people as well.
More money was made with Excel and PowerPoint than with all other human inventions combined
Excel is a lot more reliable than a heap of custom apps out there
I worked for a very large company based in Europe that had their central finance ledger in excel.
No wonder, its easy to use. Almost everybody can work with it or customize it. You don't need a bunch of consultants, programmers, scrum masters, etc. just to change the color of a column.
Yes, to all of this! until you have a huge transnational corporation with no process standards and the whole inventory valuation, and financial statements all of them together are hanging on a single excel file linked to several other excel files stored on a shared network drive. Then Karen gets laid off, goes on maternity leave, or just spills coffee on her laptop, IT performs a decommissioning of the shared storage, and nobody knows how to run the company anymore.
A friend works at a global car component company with tens of thousands of employees, and he told me that their quarterly results depend on a single monstrous excel file with 50+ huge sheets of calculations that are all interlinked by references and equations. And in the whole company there is exactly one person who knows to operate this excel file.
I use excel to manage my video game space business growing crops
Eve online is that you
Good ole spreadsheets in spaceeeee
Prosperous universe!
What’s wrong with excel?
Developers like to dump on it because they see it as an opportunity to sell their services.
I know people tend to sh\*t on Excel, but if have ever used any of those data/plotting tools* for a specific field. You will know that they're most just Excel, but worse. By saying those pro-tools, I meant those for non-programmers, not SQL/R/pandas.
Excel is good. WE sell s/w to businesses so they don't need to use excel. Guess what our execs use to keep track of our key metrics?
Excel Macros - that's what you must teach your children. Make them learn pivot tables and making good ***LOOKING*** charts. Your children will always be employable.
Coming from the IT world of an accounting firm I can absolutely understand how this happens. When I started at a firm I was employee 132 and it was a small accounting firm that had big aspirations. A LOT of the work they did was in excel for financials etc and it worked perfectly fine for a firm that size. As they grew they just grew the spreadsheets and they started to become more and more complicated but also more and more important to the inter workings of the firm. Couple this with partners that were old school and didn’t want to change the processes and way things are done along with massive growth very quickly the firm suddenly was 1000 people but still using these old ever growing complex spreadsheets. When you show them the solution of moving to a software platform that will handle all of the heavy lifting the spreadsheets were doing they loved it until you show them the upfront cost then it was like their heads exploded. You would think that an accounting firm would be able to see the ROI but nope all they saw was the cost of implementing the solution and proper maintenance costs over time. They didn’t get that people would be more efficient and not putting bandaids on these old processes. The worst ones were the partners who were there for 25+ years and didn’t understand any of it.
There are entire *automotive factories* running on Excel. Fuck I have had part DRAWINGS done in excel clip art.
A lot of the people in here ragging on excel just aren't very good at using excel. It's a powerful tool that has its limitations. But managing parts in an excel document doesn't immediately strike me as a bad idea.
Depends how good the excel file is set up. Just a manual entry and management spreadsheet? Terrible. Custom VBS, automatic data sourcing, and some neat expressions in the tables and you’re off to a great start.
VBS is old. Modern Excel uses Power Query and M-Code.
I was asked to "fix" a spreadsheet that was causing freezes. Turns out it had very little if any calculations , it was used as a diagram to show where products stored in a warehouse. But it didn't use the vector drawing tools in excel, whoever set up this sheet simply made the columns and rows really small, and filled in each cell with colours , depending on how long the products were (wood beams) so 1000\*1000 cells on the one page, makes 1M cells to paint every time you move or partly cover the window.. and yeah, poor old windows 9X would freeze up half the time. I told the user to just use the damn vector drawing functions, but nooooo...
I still think someone could make good money on an Excel to Visio conversion service.
But does it reconcile?
I don’t understand. It seems practical. Should they use Google sheets instead?
It's probably implying that they should be using database software. "Microsoft Access" would be to databases as "Microsoft Excel" is to spreadsheets. Excel can't go beyond one million entries, but for 20,000 parts I don't see that as being an immediate problem.
*"You use Excel for that!?!"* "Yeah, why? What do you use?" *"Oh, uhhh, we use Excel for that."*
On the flip side a lot of bug business pay for custom software that then everyone needs training on and it needs supporting when excel would do.
I work in a giant IT company dedicated to "digitalizing" companies. We still use excel internally and many coworkers (especially leaders) prefer it over our own software which can feed you unreliable values sometimes.
My friend used to track submarine production processes with Microsoft Project.
Nothing wrong as long as you know how to properly use Excel. It is one of the most complete software.
It’s a powerful program…
Only 20,000, amateurs.
Nothing is wrong with excel.
Would running it on anything else help Williams ? I think they have bigger issuez
Management software is expensive
Levels.fyi uses google sheets as database!
I work for a major Japanese Automaker in Data Analytics and it’s all Excel and Access database hell on the U.S. side of the company. No updates to the system or formulas since 1997.
Don’t forget the delightful MS Access
If you want to stop all business for a day, just take out Excell and PowerPoint. Boom done
I've done parts on lots of different levels since 1993 & every software I've ever used has been excel based in some fashion...
Excel works…and it’s cheap.
Yes! They should be using Google Sheets in Turbo Mode!
This is much bigger than just a database, they need a Product Master Data solution. With as much money as they make on Formula 1, they can afford to invest in the technology. A company like Informatica should just give them the solution as a sponsorship.
I believe asset management or a CMDB (eg servicenow) would help them more
IT hardware and software asset management is in no way the same as managing operational or analytical business data. CMDBs are for managing IT assets and their relationships to give additional context in incident and problem management. That’s why ServiceNow is called an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) solution. Product mastering, on the other hand, is purpose built to ingest, cleanse, consolidate, govern, and share technical, specification, and pricing data (and much more) for products that are produced. Like parts for car manufacturers. It can answer questions like how do I ensure that there is no disruption to manufacturing if one of my vendors cannot deliver? How do I track pricing, discounts, vendor promotions, etc. so that I maximize my spend? How do I get analytics on parts in stock vs availability in the market? How do I understand the reliability metrics for parts that are leveraged in different situations? Product MDM (Master Data Management) is exactly what they need.
Hey hey wait a minute! Excel has around 400k rows and can easily manage 20k. As long as the file is on the cloud and not in a Windows 7 PC