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Comment by phsource | Hacker News Reader

I'm totally on board with the overall message that building (i.e. engineering) your own internal tools come with lots of overhead, but take issue with this one point:

> My counter-argument to that is there is also lock-in with internal systems. The most common version of this is the keeper of the spreadsheet.

The author then disparages spreadsheets as becoming the exclusive domain of one employee who wouldn't want processes to change.

In reality and my experience, though, spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and accessible systems, and their close cousins (Airtable, Notion) great as well! You can customize it to your own processes and they're pretty universally understood, so the barrier to change is pretty low.

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Author here I actually think spreadsheets are great because they are so accessible. What isn’t great though is when there is a business processs that is a spreadsheet and knowledge that exists in one persons head.

It is a management failure when this is in only one person head. Outsourcing tools will not solve internal management problems.

The issue with excel is that there's no standard construction that anyone can query; most likely it's extremely hacked together since it's not a database, but made to look like one. Spreadsheets are great for doing stuff related to exports or before importing, but so, so often they lead to data islands built to either actively or passively protect someone's job.

> their close cousins (Airtable, Notion) great as well!

Their close cousins are locked, proprietary, slow, bloated, exceedingly complex, poorly designed (ui/ux), emojized, vc-backed feature extravaganza and have a subscription fee.

Experts of Excel use keyboard exclusively, their keystrokes are a melody of efficiency, expressivity and productivity that is continued to be mocked in similar fashion as the 2007-era Mac vs. PC advertisements.

I found Notion to be fairly simple to get started. Whereas when I opened Airtable my head exploded and I closed it immediately and haven't revisited it since.

I agree. Notion is a lot easier to get started on. I also should mention that Notion/Airtable vs. Excel are somewhat different types of swissarmy knives to be used in different environments. One is used in the battlefield and space exploration, the other one in a children's playground. Jokes aside, Notion has some nice features like Wiki and it wears too many hats like a joker in a circus. I love the fact that I can write a recipe with tables and markdown -> publish it to the internet to be consumed. Can't do that with Excel.

Excel has a subscription fee as well.

Yeah unfortunately. We still have a 2016 Excel license and will continue to use it.

You can buy the 2019 version as well. So far, Microsoft has given their customers the choice between one-time purchase and subscription.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

It's also a strawman argument.

The alternative could instead be a system with open standards that many vendors implement, and only relying on standardized behavior.

This works to some extent with for example SQL or C, where you can migrate from one DB or compiler to another with limited effort.

And it's also important to keep in mind that if your team is using various external tools, there is a high chance that only a couple of people will actually know how those tools work and even less of them will be able or happy to use those external tools.

i don’t think it’s the spreadsheet itself. it’s about the process and people who defend the process no matter what

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