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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Excel runs the world. Every large company claiming to be ERP-native is telling lies. Shit gets done in Excel, and is then exported back into ERP, if at all.

Things you would consider quite irresponsible to be done in Excel, is done in Excel regardless. Indeed, that annual financial report of a Fortune 500 boils down to financialresults_v2_nowaitonemorechange_final_FINAL_withcomments_official.xlsx"

My g/f works for one of the leading ERP providers. I won't tell you which one but it starts with an S and ends with AP. They're dogfooding their own ERP but employees prefer Excel.

It's like gravity, just stop resisting.

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Never, I will never stop resisting excel.

I wonder how many of these same companies end up with massive errors in their excel docs because of lack of formula control, input validation, and a whole host of other controls that ERP's are designed to prevent, that excel will happily do

Honestly I think that is why user want Excel, properly written software prevents the user from doing stupid things, excel does not

Human Error is rampant in Excel Docs, I remember a few years ago we had a project to convert some excel docs people were using into a web app, the number of mathematical errors, and invalid controls we found was unreal

Us devs like to complain about Excel because it's sloppy, but ERPs tend to be so awful to use. It's the same as thinking you know how to write clean code, then balking at everyone else's code. Excel sheets are just another "someone else's dirty code".

Given the general quality of software in the world today, I would expect that most ERPs are just as bad as Excel sheets under the hood.

We have non-excel financial reports via a web app, but of course the actual software requirements were gathered in an excel file

It is not vastly easier to use than Excel, but certainly nice when there’s a web app to find instead of a loose file

Well, theres one issue: everybody hates SAP.

You might decide to go to "cash in the mattress" if you realized how much of our modern banking system runs on excel.

Except for the back-end, which is COBOL.

fr lol everybody who's worked in IB knows this. you go look in a VDR and it's like 99% excel files and PDFs. although for smaller businesses it's usually a quickbooks export or whatever, but whenever people need to actually get shit done or do something SAP or Oracle or whatever doesn't do right or takes too long.

Excel is what you hope your competition is using.

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