Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

On top of what you're saying, the alternative is frequently a heap of under specified, under tested (and only manually tested!), copy-pasted and shoddy quality Cobol/Java/Oracle/C#/SQLServer/PHP/MySQL code.

Yes, the performance will generally be better (1 minute to run a report, not 1 hour), but I'm not sure things will generally be better. As you said, the business people can at least modify the Excel. These systems? Not so much, without an usually massive support contract (Yaaaay! for us IT people, I guess).

People sometimes make a false equivalent and imagine that the Excel jungle will be replaced by a Google-developed, 90%+ unit tested, refactored and cleaned periodically bunch of code.

View on HN

> the business people can at least modify the Excel

I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If they can change the Excel then they can also fuck up the system, and if you fuck up a system like this then it's horrendously difficult to unfuck. I think systems like this look great when they're working, but the second they go tits up you realise why people are horrified by them.

Users able to modify cod is the opensource model. It doesn't lose its benefits and advantages just because the users are not us(professional devs)

It's not so much being able to view or modify code that's the problem, but the fact that any modifications to an excel spreadsheet are inherently running in production. Open source has many benefits, but while open source projects may accept pull requests there is very few which put contributions straight into the latest build without review.

That's not a realistic comparison. I have yet to see one user try to modify Firefox's code. Spreadsheets, on the other hand ...

You are still making a distinction between user and developer. I think the point is that we can all be both.

That's not the issue at all. The issue is that these systems invariably have no review process, no testing, and no versioning (at best they'll have each spreadsheet versioned with no real way to know what each version contains). And this makes them incredibly fragile.

Especially since the people who do this generally don't use version control.

They do use version control. They put each version in a folder named after the date

And these user-developed systems are often great...until someone accidently deletes or changes some data and it becomes a mess.

Unfortunately, many businesses then find they have no way to know the extent of the data lost or who did it. And there’s no proper backups. Happens over and over thoughout the world.

Excel’s a great tool and there are lots of terrific uses for it. But what the article describes isn’t one of them. If we’re being honest, this isn’t the first time the issue’s been discussed and the companies likely aren’t actually switching away from excel, but rather supplementing it.

In fact, the article seems to be more a “hit job” / “marketing piece” for Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc. and Adaptive Insights.

I agree, the issue is not Excel as such but how it's being handled: I once wrote a blog post on how you can unit test Excel spreadsheets, too: https://www.zoomeranalytics.com/blog/unittests-for-microsoft...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com