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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

I’m not convinced there’s a such thing as “correct usage of excel.”

What a lot of companies do is just scare entry level employees into being very careful. My friend’s girlfriend works at a place like this and people just accept all the problems with manually editing large spreadsheets because “that’s just life.”

Anything in excel is a hack and most of its users don’t know any better.

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What's your solution? That the manager who wanted some report comes to you and begs you to do it and in 6 months it's finally delivered and all wrong?

The sweet spot where I work is online forms that pre-populate excel playgrounds and allow download. Then, you can tweak till your heart's content.

The manager goes to the people, who really know how to make a report (maybe that is "accounting"?) and asks them to make the report taking into account some single report specific things that they talk about. Then those people, who know how to do it deliver. They might have someone in their team, who knows how to work with dataframes, which would come in handy. Those people store the program written to generate the report from the data and are ready to modify when more is requested. Instead of doing code in Excel, they simply write their code in whatever language they use to process spreadsheets or other data sources.

If they have knowledgeable people there, it will take no longer than coding something up in Excel and will be more reliable.

I guess no one has used Power BI for reporting... Link the data source, save the view that "Manager A" wants every week or month, setup on premesis gateway, and your new reports are there before your are asked for them again. Always up to date. Then share your dashboard. Also, you guys should be ashamed of yourselves. "not sure who does the reports, maybe finance?" Eceryone should know how to make their own reports.

If you regularly produce reports one would suppose that you would have an existing project template and know how that would allow a reasonable individual to deliver a result that isn't all wrong in a reasonable length of time not THAT dissimilar from the time to throw up a spreadsheet.

This also wouldn't silo the data in the users laptop, subject it to being destroyed because the user dropped it, and limit frequency of updates and access to how fast the user can respond to emails.

And meanwhile the manager that broke the rules, connected their personal copy of excel straight into the database and made the company 8 figures in profit over the course of the last year just outdid you and your team of report programmers.

And meanwhile an actual data scientist looked at the data and outdid the manager by a factor of 10, by creating a more meaningful report, that is based on an actual statistically sound basis, preventing a disaster.

See, we can all conjure up imaginary people. :)

Logically most of the profit making activities may be enabled by tech it usually isn't created by tech. The managers rule breaking activities are probably unrelated to his success.

In my experience, business success is often hinged on the reports and the insights they provide. Without accurate numbers, you've got nothing to go on.

I can't not remember now the Salesforce for developers article :)

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