But the lack of reliability of “a spreadsheet made by John in Accounting” sorely limits the success it can have.
We built xltrail[0] (cloud and self-hosted SaaS) that lets you see the diffs for sheets, VBA, and a couple other things. You put in your git repo and it just works. You can also have a manual versioning option where you upload new versions of the same file and you get the same result.
We also have the open source git extension Git XL[1] that lets you see VBA diffs locally.
For me, it often looks like this.
2023 Budget v3 - 2022.08.01.xlsb
2023 Budget v3 - 2022.08.05.xlsb
2023 Budget v3 - 2022.08.08.xlsb
2023 Budget v3 - 2022.08.12.xlsb
The dates indicate minor updates/changes to the data (eg. the database is different but the logic is the same). Where as the version number is a change of business logic &/ formulas &/ file architecture (so v3 files are usually compatible with v3 files, but v4 files may break everything when comparing back to v3).
Granted, it doesn't help any with collaboration. My team still passes around the "current" file and deal with read-only locking issues (we find shared mode to be highly broken and conducive to file corruption). But, it does help with auditing because we can always go back and find why a number was what it was on any given day. So in that sense, Excel documents are as auditable as open source software. You have to want to read the code but it's all there for the reading.
We want to save after Big Change X has been made, not at a random interval in time.... so everyone at the office rightly disables autosave
It's also a Workbook level setting so, you might have it turned off, but someone sends you a file with it enabled. For that reason, I have a macro that disables it at Open for all files (same for calculate before save, I really dislike that setting too).
Asking for software is like a gestapo interrogation - your always not right and in the end all motives are questioned.
We currently migrate everything to the cloud, which breaks many Excels that so far got their inputs from on-prem services or the file system. What could previously be deployed without second thought now requires extensive, decentralized cloud knowledge in each team. Power is taken from the lay business user. What took seconds in VBA now requires a feature request to a dev team.. it's insane.
I'm in HFT so we have software engineers available to our portfolio managers. Everything is in code.
Live strategies are deployed via a script that ultimately ssh to a machine, plops a set of artifacts in from storage, and then runs. But everything needs to restart together.
Given a complete set of requirements and a working prototype, will the IT department ever finish writing software that meets those requirements?
Okay, that was sarcastic, but illustrates a real problem, which is that doing it in Excel is making something, whereas getting IT involved is managing something -- a category error. The problems of managing software development are unchanged, half a century after The Mythical Man Month.
Yup, so easy to audit.
Spreadsheet Compare, an official diff tool, is excellent