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Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

Tons of businesses continue to function with excel without difficulty. Of course if you're shooting for a SV "unicorn" growth curve you're going to leave excel in the dust pretty quick, but a great many businesses in a wide range of industries find excel continues to meet their demands for a lot longer than you might expect.

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I know more than one company with revenues >$1B where P&L roll-ups are still done manually in Excel.

A lot of companies don’t want to invest in tech they don’t control or understand.

My whole business used to be run on Zapier, Google Sheets, and Google Apps Script.

Out of curiosity. Did it stay that way or did you manage to migrate to another solution? If so, what did that look like? Interested because I’m in a similar situation.

A lot of things fell through the cracks with Google Sheets and Zapier handling everything. I eventually just moved to building a personal dashboard using Next.js and connected with the APIs directly.

“you’re going to leave excel in the dust pretty quick”

no. this does not happen. everyone uses excel.

Amen. 90% of the time, companies build process and automation on top of Excel. Success for SaaS is changing HOW companies use Excel, not IF.

Startups hardly bother with licensing excel/365 these days, and just pop into sheets. From my experience, you don't usually start bringing excel into the equation until you hire that one sales manager that insists on it, or the "Microsoft guy/gal" that just keeps asking "why aren't we using excel?" over and over again.

Or until you're at the scale where you're working with datasets/queries simply too big or too complex for Sheets to handle effectively.

At my current job (late-ish stage SF startup), most of us default to Google Sheets, but there have been enough use cases for "real" Excel alone to warrant setting up Office 365 licensing/accounts and defining a flow for that at the corporate level instead of just one-off licenses here and there.

Our finance team in particular (or at least specific key members thereof) has to use the Windows version of excel because both the macOS version and Google Sheets rapidly buckle under the datasets they're manipulating in their monthly reconciliations. My team has been working on various tools and systems (mostly as extensions to our ERP) to better automate some of these things, but Excel is still a reality until that happens for all their use cases.

> Or until you're at the scale where you're working with datasets/queries simply too big or too complex for Sheets to handle effectively.

At which, again from my perspective and view of things which may be wrong, startups are more likely to automate/productize that so they can better maintain and dogfood it if possible instead of letting someone's Excel workbook grow into a pet ML tool that only they understand.

I think this is where our respective experiences diverge, at least momentarily. Yeah, eventually a company will (hopefully) try to build better tools (as I and the rest of my team are trying to do in our case), but there will be an often-long gap between some employee creating a spreadsheet-based monstrosity and some engineering team turning that into a better tool/system.

Because of excel's swiss-army-knife powers, it will always be present somewhere in most organisations, I agree.

But if you start your business with your stock and order tracking in excel, your customer list in excel, and your accounts in excel, it's not unusual to outgrow excel in some of those areas fairly quickly.

Right, Amazon's inventory system certainly can't be run out of a spreadsheet. But even for something like a very successful restaurant with half a dozen locations across the state, a few spreadsheets often sit comfortably in the middle of it all.

Accounts in Excel is a recipe for disaster

I worked for a clearing company that mainly dealt with commodities market and option exchanges. It was a fight to get the individuals in finance to use the software we developed because they would just use Excel with macros. I had even been asked to look at one of the workbooks they were using to fix an error they had been having.

The problem with the software you developed is that they have to give up control. Every change is a change request which needs to be approved and implemented and tested and released.

The upside is higher quality, the downside is way reduced turnaround speed if they need to change something.

I understand why people using Excel are often reluctant to give it up.

This. Excel democratizes computation in a way that code has yet to do. If something breaks, non-technical people can just jump in and fix it. If they need new functionality, same thing. They don't have to bring in (or retain) a specialist. That's an incredibly powerful proposition.

Quality often goes down. That request process results in you getting what you ask for, not what you want.

Think about anything that you do in Excel. In what scenario do you roll with exactly what you initially start with?

I just did a preliminary capital forecast in Excel. I could have used something like Google sheets as well, but beyond that, the lack of flexibility makes purpose built solutions less able without specialized people that I don’t have or domain knowledge that I don’t possess.

>>Tons of businesses continue to function with excel without difficulty.

Without difficulty? No, definitely not. The difficulty is always there, it's just internalized, ignored or worked around in various (often crazy) ways.

Without difficulties induced by scale. Some sorts of businesses will hit scale issues with excel, but many will not.

The baseline difficulty of using excel is not what I'm talking about and I don't consider it relevant since experience has proven that baseline difficulty is not much of an obstacle to real adoption.

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