Comment by navneetloiwal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by navneetloiwal | Hacker News Reader

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This! As programmers, it is easy to list N reasons why spreadsheets suck and deserve to die. But the reality is that it is the most ubiquitous business software and the non-tech/business users would rather be in a spreadsheet than anywhere else. Companies run on spreadsheets, even if they have the best "data stack" and tools. Because few, if any, software can beat the

* flexibility (throw data anywhere and link it to each other, make edits, write notes),

* power (formulas, etc), and

* familiarity (the most underrated factor) of spreadsheets.

Nothing else allows the non-tech user to feel empowered like spreadsheets do.

Spreadsheet evolution has been slow though. Google Sheets added cloud + collaboration 10 years ago. We (https://coefficient.io) are adding the layer of connectivity to sheets so they can remain in sync with the actual sources of data (Cloud apps like Salesforce, DBs, BI tools, etc) so sheets actually become "live" (even though they have been in the cloud for a while) and to reduce manual work and increase trust/accuracy. There is so much more that can be done to leverage this largest software platform that is out there.

I used to work at in construction as an estimator and we used spreadsheets. No backups, no version control, a single value change took 10s of minutes to propagate through the many sheets in the file. We fixed errors when we saw them, but I always felt it was an exercise in pointlessness.

These were not small companies either, ~$800M in yearly revenue for one, and ~$150M for the other.

Then, afterwards, the end value would be massaged to what felt right. And yet, these sheets were seen as part of the "secret sauce" of the business.

It's one of the reasons I really wanted out.

Programmers have a reputation of being arrogant assholes, but I think this push-back and ridiculing other industries of using excel for stuff like this is completely justified. Excel spreadsheets let these people FEEL productive and like masters of their own fate with a bunch of numbers neatly encapsulated in their own little cells in a table, but their actual usefulness is questionable. For construction, it gives a rough feel for a project, but a lot of it is smoke and mirrors.

> I used to work at in construction as an estimator and we used spreadsheets. No backups, no version control, a single value change took 10s of minutes to propagate through the many sheets in the file. We fixed errors when we saw them, but I always felt it was an exercise in pointlessness. These were not small companies either, ~$800M in yearly revenue for one, and ~$150M for the other.

Jesus... want to start a competitor to these guys!? Email me

I can't remember where I read it but at one point Boeing was maintaining the entire bill of materials for one (maybe more) of their aircraft in a spreadsheet. I tried to google it but could not find the reference. I did find that Boeing actually had their own in-house spreadsheet software for a while, which was kind of interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Calc

I think I big mistake people make here is that they think they are far better at everything on a computer than a non-programmer. They don't realize how much you can do in Excel and how much they suck at it. If you can't use it without a mouse and/or if you don't know pivot tables, you are just as much of a beginner as a C++ programmer who doesn't know what a pointer is.

It's only after trying to convert an excel sheet to [insert your favorite language] that they realize it would take them 6 month with a team of 5 to replicate what a single accountant did in a week.

Entirely true. Many physicists also basically live in Excel. And replicating the functionality of pivot tables isn't at all trivial and they also have a lot of helpers by now. In many cases you just need to click it and have all column neatly formatted so that you don't have to do much anymore.

I also have seen Access applications with more features than a common Salesforce CRMs. I have seen it as a navigation system that could bring you to the nearest partners or shops that provide necessary parts. Yes, there is code of doom behind it and if those maintainers leave the company, problems arise. But the feature set was often extremely hard to beat.

And I am not sure how to respond to non-technical users about better alternatives. They use it as a front end for SQL manipulation and it isn't easy to come up with something better for that target group.

Even worse is SharePoint. It is a complete abomination, it can easily beat most horror novels. But the workflow engines are just extremely practical for corporate processes. Only recently some alternatives came to the market... I just wish I could kill it...

> Spreadsheet evolution has been slow though.

Excel has to contend with nearly 40 years of backwards compatibility (MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, was released in 1982) and a deep userbase that literally has decades of experience and muscle memory with the software. The Symbolic Link "SYLK" file format introduced in MultiPlan is still supported in recent versions of Excel, leading to the infamous CSV "ID" issue.

Many of our users still run very old versions of Excel and Windows (e.g. Excel 5.0 on Windows 95) because a change in a future version of Excel caused problems or gave different results.

> Nothing else allows the non-tech user to feel empowered like spreadsheets do.

I'd say it allows the same for technical users as well since it helps bridge communication/knowledge gaps and move things along. It's typically not the solution but often plays a critical supporting role.

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