Hacker News Reader

Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

> Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail?

It has remarkable stickiness but the replacement for Excel isn't another spreadsheet, it's programming + databases. SAP and other custom business software are pretty big especially in large organizations. Word is pretty replaceable, as is the rest of MS Office, especially if you have a custom solution instead of relying on Excel. Self-hosting email is definitely a thing for massive corporations. And don't forget 2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European.

74% tracks. Lots do depend on MS and Google solutions, but enough don't.

View on HN

You can replace excel with programming and a DB only up to a certain point.

The advantage of excel is that any office worker can perform data manipulation there. It can't be replaced for una-tantum operations on data, because it isn't practical to do custom implementations every time you need something.

The alternative is to teach programming to every office worker and give them access to the db. Not sure it's a good idea

I wish this site had emojis so I could spam the facepalm emoji.

You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.

The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.

Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?

Because Excel and Sheets exist, most businesses don’t bother with custom software for things that basic spreadsheets can handle, which is a lot.

Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.

But many companies also misuse Excel for tasks for which it's a poor fit. They also use it for data entry that has nothing to do with financial calculations, and Excel is not suitable for maintaining data. One of my big frustrations has been watching business people put literally everything in Excel and then mailing that around.

> You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations

There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".

But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it

> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason

Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.

> alternative is to teach programming to every office worker

Programming in business environments is becoming ever more popular using languages like Python and R

It’s nowhere near as pervasive as Excel but I could see AI playing a big part here. Most Excel domain projects don’t require a high degree of technical understanding so autogenerated Python code that is “good enough” can be easily generated. Hell AI alone could take over most of the basic data crunching usecases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com