Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So true, I used to run European cross-docking ops, planning, inventory, forecasting, scheduling, in Excel back the day. Successfully scaled by 100% YoY for three years. Was quite a lot of fun.

Issue I have with that approach is not using excel per se. It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). That and over engineering spreadsheets to the point where nobody but the creator can use them anymore. At that point you data just gets suspect. And circumventing existing systems with local offline spreadsheets just screws up everything. Now combine these two.

But that has less to do with spreadsheets themselves, see my fist point regarding cross docking, and more with the application. Used correctly spreadsheets can be incredibly powerful. And at least for my purposes I have yet to encounter an analysis issue I failed to dig through using Excel. Sure, something like Python might have worked better but consider me to be an empowered user (read: I have no clue about Python or SQL or...). And at least I knew I could trust the way the analysis was done as intended.

> It is using Eycel in addition to what ever system is being used the first place (SAP for example is a pretty popular thing to circumvent with Excel sheets). (...) And circumventing existing systems with local offline spreadsheets just screws up everything.

I usually side with the circumventers on this one. This misbehavior happens for a reason, which usually is that it's impossible or infeasible to do the work with "proper" systems. Excel sheets on pendrives is what you get when people can't exchange data using "correct" software, or when people need to continuously iterate on the shape of the data set, while getting the schema changed in the "correct" system would involve a ticket to IT and 2 months of waiting.

I think instead of paying people for doing a job and then doing everything possible to make that job difficult, companies should embrace that people will work around any deficiencies of top-down systems, whether software or procedural. But I guess this tug-of-war exists since the time of first corporations.

True that. I used to both back then, first a user and then a SAP system guy. For me it is always a death spiral: people don't trust the system or it is too cumbersome, they use Excel, the system gets even less reliable, the use Excel even more,... and so on. I always saw it as my role a system guy to give users a system they can use and then force them to actually use it. Because, when providing the systemnI talked to them first so in the end it was ind of their system too.

And then there are examples like the production planning done in Excel because SAP PP isn't just good enough. Then the guy who created said Excel tool left. Years later when production had to switch to weekend shifts zhey couldn't because no one could adopt the Excel tool. Once you reach that point you are screwed.

Agree but slight modification - goal should always be for the users to be able to do their main functional tasks in-application and maintain it as the system of record.

But there will always be a use for Excel as a tool for informal data-monkeying and analysis - exporting a table and doing some pivots to summarize or use a different view. Non-technical users will always expect this capability and flock back to it. Not everyone's a programmer or has the interest to be - you'll have to pry excel out of most accountant's cold, dead hands for example

You describe the ideal world. Tools like SAP or Business Warehouse suck at data crunching and nor everyone can use Python for example. Even ops can under the right circumstances be okish offline in Excel as long as results are imported into e.g. SAP to assure data integrity.

I feel like PowerBI is a good solution to overcome Excel's deficiencies while working well with Excel. It forces you to structure your data and define measures while being dyanamic, efficient and friendly to less structured inputs.

I have to give PowerBI a serious shot. We have it at my current place but nibody is really using so I need some spare time to dive into it. Now, the more I think about it, the combination of MS Office, Power BI and MS Dynamics with a shopfront from, say Shopify would make up a quite nice e-commerce set up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com