Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel sheets?
In almost all jobs I had there was a boss running the show with some badly designed & not updated excel sheet. What is your experience?
Excel is universal: I can share an excel sheet with Tim from accounting, Jessica from purchasing, Jared from the warehouse, Kathy on the shop floor, John from sales, and Kim from a vendor, and I can expect them all to be able to read and make changes to it.
Another important point is it's longevity. I often find myself opening cost sheets created 30 years ago, and they work without issue in the current version of Excel. I expect they'll work 30 years from now too.
Is it the optimum tool for all jobs? No, far from it, but I've yet to encounter a situation where it turned out to be a poor choice. (Note: Obviously your database shouldn't be in Excel, but you better have an "export to Excel" feature if you expect it to be useful to others.)
"Badly designed" and "not updated" are not unique problems to Excel and I'd argue it's a whole lot easier for most people to fix an Excel sheet than even, say, a python script.
We use Metabase at my work where we can pull a bunch of great data for dashboards and tables for non-developers and it's great. We can also build nice internal dashboards with all sorts of aggregated data. Still, a lot of the team uses just a mix of a few Metabase dashboards and spreadsheets with manually imported CSVs from services like Stripe. It works well for them. As a developer, I'd want to optimize and automate some of that away, but there's a good chance I'd spend more time than them.
I think you can look at spreadsheets as a form of tech debt. If the debt's interest rate is low (as it is in many situations where spreadsheets are used for long periods of time), then you might never need to get rid of it. If it has a high interest rate (not scaling or working well given the current work load), then it's time to move over to specialized software. Time wise, it's not unlikely that the interest rate is low and it won't need to be swapped out for a long time, or even ever.
While these spreadsheets could use some (or a lot) of work, they seem to be working just fine for the businesses for the most part. As developers, I think we like structure and efficiency, sometimes to a fault.
The idea of ‘interest’ on tech debt is awesome. Never heard of it before and will be using this in the future. Thanks!
It is the nature of many a developer to scoff at non-programmers running the world with supposedly nightmarish Excel sheets. And there is probably a lot of valid criticism.
But it works.
And any time I see Engineers trying to engineer things to their own taste, they just make things worse. You'll either make some portal with an inferior feature set or you'll reimplement a crappy Excel. Work with the Excel status quo, not against it. Don't look down at the problem from high atop a mountain, but rather admire just how incredibly effective Excel is as a swiss army programming tool that basically anyone in a business can use.
Where systems do win over spreadsheets is definitely in terms of data integrity, security and multi user experience so remember to sell the benefits and not just "look at the cool web experience / app we built".
Recently I went through the process of creating a non-trivial spreadsheet with bunch of tables, custom formulas and such. Things like costs with cost groups, person-days, person-availability, social costs, package calculations, profit and loss projections…
I’m mind blown. Excel is a powerful technology. It’s amazing how it tracks cell references in formulas and calculations automatically when rows/columns are added or removed.
Real-time visual feedback is unprecedented. You have 20 interconnected formulas? Awesome, change one value and everything recalculates in front of you.
It took me 22 years to arrive at the conclusion that some tasks are just simpler with a spreadsheet. Especially when I want to present the outcome to non-dev people. You go into a meeting and someone asks you “what happens if they travel so and so often instead of what you have now”. Or “what if we add these two things into that cost group and won’t offer x and y, can you also hide that for a second just to compare”. This is so easy to amend in Excel.
Good luck opening your editor and changing the code live because you haven’t planned for a third travel option.
Google Sheets is okay. I'm missing tables since I started using them in Excel. Named tables with totals row is just so handy.
My issue is that they're very bad to use on mobile. It just feels off - like when the first smartphones arrived and you had to zoom in on every single website because they weren't optimized for small screens.
Additionally, you lose a lot of portability. My most recent example of this is discovering that macros don't work on mobile while trying to use a sheet that relied on them.
I would maybe even pay money for a better spreadsheet, or even DB frontend user experience on mobile.
http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
They get posted to HN from time to time. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=eusprig.org
This is from a few years ago, but I heard that JPM (at the time) had over 20k MS Access database on their file servers.
The company I worked for had over 12k. I was able to reduce the count by a good chunk by automating a lot of processes and moving workloads to sql queries that retrieved data from our data warehouses, but still a boatload.
The world is run on horribly formatted spreadsheets.
On top of that, it's so common that everybody just knows how to use it. Don't need to train people on some super niche excel alternative when you can just use Excel. That benefit is probably understated.
Badly designed is an opinion. It works for them and matches their thought process, ergo it's perfectly designed for their workflow.
I knew a project manager who's job seemed to be reconciling multiple versions of a spreadsheet with different authors.
We have to follow the chief architects template that contains all these fancy column counting macros. I absolutely hate this because no one has any idea where the source template is, causing us to copy and paste one from the previous jira ticket, which inevitably breaks.
If there was a gui program that let you fill out a test plan form, it would make my teams lives easier, but instead all I know of is Gherkin. Learning someone’s domain specific language to fill out test plans sounds egotistically asinine. Idc how powerful it is, I need something simple that normal non hobby developers can jump into and do their job. Sigh
Yes. My experience is that my performance is evaluated via a spreadsheet that calibrated me against others on the team/dept. Spreadsheets are commonly used at most places. There are errors in some. However, I think the bigger errors are in the systems they represent rather than strictly in their implementation. Also, stale data is common since many people manually update stuff and aren't diligent about it.
Cell validation is a relatively unknown feature and almost nobody can resist the urge to write comments where data should be and vice versa.
Other than that it's pretty neat software. I find myself using it to perform string manipulation on computers without the usual coreutils suite.
We had complex, up-to-date excel models for every investment. We’d update them whenever the company released financials or when there were significant changes in rates.
There likely is C Code generated by an Excel sheet on a plane you have flown on. It certainly is not as bad as it sounds, but also nobody (not an exaggeration, I talked to the guy who created it) knows exactly how it works.
In general, I found that most clients have both "god spreadsheets" that seem to continually accrue data and control operations in often opaque ways, and nightmarishly-complex reporting spreadsheets generated by upstream systems that, if one thing goes wrong, explode into bits of #VALUE!s. It's neither good nor bad, just a fact of life. One client we engaged with -- one of the largest companies in the world -- had what we called "the ten-billion-dollar spreadsheet," because that's literally the amount of annual funds it controlled, even though it was completely invisible at the executive level. (Sad to say, but my lasting contribution to humanity is probably helping unlock an additional billion dollars of capitalist investment a year by moving a key part of that spreadsheet to a simple but far more accurate regression model.)
The entire financial sector is a case of "turtles all the way down" excel. And no it doesn't get any better when the numbers start having more zeroes.
The long answer, definitely. However, this is what two generations of white-collar workers are trained on.
It does have flavors though and sometimes comes in access or sql form too =)