Ask HN: How to find businesses running their operations on spreadsheets?

2 points·jainvivek··6 comments

In my experience, most businesses are running some portion of their operations in spreadsheets.

More importantly: they don't want to change. They're running things out of spreadsheets because that represents the technical skills their staff has. They don't want to learn a new, specialized tool for a process when a spreadsheet works. They don't want to pay for that specialized tool. They don't want to deal with troubleshooting it when it fails.

When people talk about jobs lost to automation, we tend to think it's robots building things, but in reality most of it is because of something like someone using a modern resource management system, instead of paying accountants who were doing math on desk calculators and copying it into a spreadsheet, because that's the only way they know how to do it.

Spreadsheets can also be automated to perform specific functions.

I should have framed the question better. I meant to ask for businesses where all/major operations are being run on spreadsheets.

"they don't want to change": Do you think they are open to use spreadsheet's extensions or just want to stick to plain spreadsheets?

Isn't it most of them? Look them up on LinkedIn and ask. Walk in the front door and ask.

I meant to ask for businesses where all/major operations are being run on spreadsheets.

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