In a similar vein, there are plenty of small software teams that use nothing more than a whiteboard for project management. Yet there are teams tooled up with Jira/Trello/Slack with much less productivity.
If two business processes interact through a spreadsheet, or more than two people edit, you're going to immediately run up against the rough edges. Multiple people editing the same sheet inevitably ends in error. It can take a really gross amount of time to update the data when you're pulling/pushing from two sources. It may seem small on the surface, but even 2 hours a week adds up to nearly 3 weeks of work over a year. Can you replace this spreadsheet in 3 weeks?
I've seen this play out many times at large and small scale. The first example that comes to mind is a 10-hour day trip my wife took to go out of town and manually update a whiteboard because somebody messed up the shared spreadsheet. She was very unhappy, and this wasted a precious day during a _very_ busy period. Initially, the whiteboard and spreadsheet worked great, so they didn't "fix" it. It didn't scale to the busy times and really screwed them over.
At a much smaller scale, I wrote a quick SQL query to get some business metrics for the CEO. He asked if I could run it for him every week. Since I didn't have a good place to put this query, I just ran it manually and emailed it to him at first. Then he wanted to share it with someone on the opposite coast outside our network, so he asked if I could start putting it in a shared spreadsheet. My initial thought was to bang out a page they could pull up instead, but I figured it wasn't worth it. Then he wanted another metric. And another that required a bit of logic that couldn't be done in SQL. Pretty soon I was spending an hour a week manually running SQL and copying the results in to a spreadsheet. (We're a Google Drive shop. No way to connect Sheets to DB2.) That's simply not worth my time. I should've listened to my first instinct.
The initial investment in a spreadsheet isn't large, but the ongoing maintenance can really rack up hours. I think it's very often worth investigating any spreadsheet that users have been maintaining/recreating for more than a quarter.
FWIW, Google has an API that can be used to get data into and out of things like Sheets. The documentation for it is abysmal and there are only a few libraries out there, most of which aren't complete. But, I've done it, and have some rough (but easy-to-understand) code that can "import" Sheets into MySQL. Going the other way should be a matter of tweaking the Google account permissions and calling a couple of different functions.
It's in PHP, but it's not gross PHP, so you can probably translate it into whatever you're familiar with.
Yes, the App Script API is kind of limited, but also extremely powerful for simple services or to glue services together.
You can for example set up a cron job to post some json to that endpoint and have the js validate it and update a sheet accordingly (or even create a new one).
There's a reason Excel is so powerful, but it can't magically solve for people lacking a process and most software solutions solve it by using complex permissions, versioning and collaboration features. You can just easily lock down the shared spreadsheet to readonly and have 1 or 2 people who are designated editors and get the same effect, or just have the changes done on a new tab and compare that way.
Even the most amazing software can and will get screwed up by users who don't have a process.
If there's a better way then suggest it, or at the very least document the time and effort spent on these reports. If they are that critical (which they usually are for decision making) then it shouldn't be an issue when planning future work.
I’m not sure how “global level” organisations are, but mostly you just can’t convince a typical layman CEO that something looks easy, is really not easy.
Then when you serve the “small request”, next he’s in doubt why adding a small feature could increase the complexity of your work by a few order of magnitude.
The problem isnt Excel or any useful tool, its the misapplication of the tool and seeing people driving that same road already extremely well traveled.
I can't count the many times a business process is done (poorly) by inputing lots of data in an excel file, running a huge (poorly written) macro, and spending the file via email to the next person and so on...
This means that if your computing problem doesn't need to scale, a spreadsheet may just be the perfect tool.
However, I agree with you. The next Facebook might be of whomever builds a spreadsheet that scales.
I tried smartsheets but it’s more calc centric. Asana is great if you are task centric.
You've never seen panic like a multi million dollar business discovering that excel doesn't allow more than some fixed number of rows (1m?).
I think something lost in this conversation is how spreadsheets are largely a part of general primary school curriculum. Generally people have a feeling of confidence around them that is lost with other tools. Particularly "easy database" applications that attempt to replace spreadsheets.
The opposite is also true: You can make a decent living creating, customizing or even just maintaining domain-specific tools, no matter if the customer's business really needs them or not.
It's very easy to criticize something by saying you don't need it. There are very few things in life that you absolutely need.
Yet there are things that add convenience, greater efficiency, etc, and people will pay for them.
A spreadsheet works until it doesn't.
Maybe you load in past, say, 150mb of data.
Perhaps the last person to touch it linked it to a data or content source they only have access to.
Perhaps the person editing it has it checked out from a Sharepoint and forgot to check it back in.
Perhaps the person editing it left it open on their computer and forgot about it being hosted on a shared drive.
Perhaps the business critical sheet is hosted on someone's desktop.
Fundamentally, spreadsheets are cocktail napkins. It's fine to sketch out a basic idea. It's a terribly risky approach to run a business from it.
And I've found out that having excel export of essentially any data in your line of bussines application is indispensable unless you expose some kind of excel-like querying and data manipulation mechanism to users as part of your application.
I work for a small company, we generally use Jira (which we all hate, some with more of a passion than others... ok mainly me).
More recently we sort of accidentally started using google sheets for managing issues on some long running projects: it's easier to get an overview, i can add and remove unnecessary attributes of issues and filter them appropriately and dynamically without having to define a whole new workflow and start over. It takes basically the smallest amount of time possible to log an issue... I can organise them however I want. Issue management is overrated, issues are simple, and having something as flexible as a spreadsheet is a surprisingly good fit for anything not customer facing.
Oh also, I don't need to _learn_ how to do all those things... it's a spreadsheet so it's obvious, but Jira - it's so hard to do anything unless you live by it, I don't want to live by an issue manager I want it to get the fuck out of the way so i can do work.
I one worked at a place where a key part of the finance system ran on a spreadsheet - turns out this SS had mess up or finances and was one of the reasons the company restructured.
If what you are doing is applying math formulas over small or medium sizes of data, then excel is OK.
Otherwise it will suck and will be a waste of man-hours at the Office.
I can't believe I'm about to sink so low, but... criteria!
Criterions are what one adds to soup ;)
You're thinking of crouta.
Besides, I wanted to make a somewhat self-deprecating comment, rather than - as you have here - regurgitate some half-arsed passive aggressive form.