Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs (wsj.com) 273
Tatyana Shumsky, reporting for WSJ: Adobe's finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company. The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets. From there they can see which groups are hiring and how salary spending affects the budget. "I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," Mr. Garrett said. He is working on cutting Excel out of this process, he said. CFOs at companies including P.F. Chang's China Bistro, ABM Industries and Wintrust Financial are on a similar drive to reduce how much their finance teams use Excel for financial planning, analysis and reporting (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available). Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn't kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn't automatically updated.
Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad they're not a software company. If they were, they could probably have someone code up a new system to automate this.
That snark aside, Excel is generally a pretty clunky and fragile system for anything complicated, even if you have it linked to your data sources. If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company. They've identified a software need that large companies have. They're one of a handful of companies where it would make sense for this sort of stuff to be developed.
I'm sure that Walmart and Ford likely have the same need, but their expertise isn't in making Software. But then again, neither is Adobe's.....
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If you're dealing with a million records and not summary data, that would be the problem. IMHO. You can manipulate and abstract out the relevant (meta) information separately that does reflect what the BI is supposed to be telling you. Unless that is what the BI bit is supposed to be doing. In which case, you're screwed.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I might as well do it all in SQL
This is about accountants and marketing people. They know how to write Excel macros. They do NOT know how to write SQL queries, nor how to integrate SQL into their applications, nor do they have permission to directly access the SQL database on the server.
If you know how to use SQL, then you are not who TFA is talking about.
Re: Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Then they should hire a DBA, problem solved
Adobe has DBAs. The problem is not solved.
If an accountant needs to extract values from a column of data using a certain criteria these are the alternatives:
1. Write an Excel macro. Elapsed time: 5 minutes.
2. Go talk to the DBA. The DBA declines the request, and tells the accountant to go through his manager. The accountant then schedules a meeting with his manager for next Tuesday to discuss the issue. The meeting lasts 40 minutes, and the manager approves the request. The request is then written up as a formal spec, taking about a hour. The spec is then forwarded to the DBA's manager, and sits in her inbox. After a week, the accountant checks on the status, and finds out that no one is working on his request, and asks the DBA's manager to forward the request. The request is finally forwarded to the DBA, where it is placed at the back of his work queue. Finally, after two months, the accountant has his request ... except is isn't actually what he needed because the DBA implemented what the spec said rather than what it was meant to say. The frustrated accountant then extracts the entire DB into an Excel file and writes a macro in 5 minutes.
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Write an Excel macro. Elapsed time: 5 minutes.
These guys are likely doing very elaborate stuff, so more like 2 weeks. (There's an entire ecosystem of Excel programmers, with no formal training, doing stuff like re-inventing quicksort.)
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company.
Debatable. They're a software company in the same way I'm a programmer; yes, I can cobble together a program to achieve various objectives, but I'm hardly ever proud of the quality of the code.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
I can cobble together a program to achieve various objectives, but I'm hardly ever proud of the quality of the code.
IF you are aware that is what you are doing, then you're already in the top 80th percentile of programmers.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad they're not a software company. If they were, they could probably have someone code up a new system to automate this.
It's a classic problem referenced for centuries as "The cobbler's children have no shoes." If you're a software company your developers are seen as a resource to develop code that you sell for revenue, not code up internal systems. You also don't want to pay another software company to solve your problem because you might either a) compete with them or b) think you should do it internally (even though you can't or won't).
It's not unique to software. I once worked for a mechanic shop that had a handful of company cars that were in terrible shape. Same deal. The boss never wanted his mechanics to work on the company fleet, but he sure as heck wasn't going to pay a competing mechanical shop to work on them either.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
The reality of financial analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company.
The people at Adobe doing the financial analysis work are decidedly NOT software developers. That has a lot to do with it.
As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor. I say this as a a certified accountant and have done this sort of work professionally. Seriously, it's a lot harder than you think. People get very upset if you mess up the software that tracks the money. Replacing spreadsheets is going to be near impossible for a lot of tasks. Plus you need a tool that is flexible enough to roll with all sorts of unexpected business processes and analysis.
Despite it's many flaws, nobody has come up with a better general purpose tool for ad-hoc analysis and reporting than a spreadsheet and most finance geeks use Excel. There also is a strong whiff of "if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail". Finance people go to spreadsheets because it's the tool they already know how to use and have available. Yes sometimes there are better ways to do things but when you are asked to get the job done in some absurdly short time frame (which happens ALL the time in finance/accounting) you're going to go with what you know even if it isn't ideal. That said, Excel and other spreadsheets could do a LOT better job integrating with data sources and adapting to the real world needs of financial professionals. Frankly Microsoft (and Libreoffice) have been quite lazy in this regard. It remains an unnecessarily huge pain in the ass to pull data from outside sources into spreadsheets. And even when you can do it it is quite fragile and easy to break.
Actually if you really want to be depressed, you would be amazed at how many accountants still use paper tape calculators even when they have a spreadsheet available to them. Good luck getting those people to move to a custom designed piece of software.
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As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor.
Having written just a simple customer billing program for a customer service department, I'm well aware of this. Corporate customers billed by the month, by the minute, N free calls per month before billing at X rate, free first 10 minutes of support, all support summed up and billed by the hour....it was a fucking nightmare.
But prior to that, all the CS staff were just logging it in Excel, and sending it to the manager to sum up each month.New manager took one look at that process, shit their pants, and ca
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Calling Excel "clunky and fragile" is accurate, but still too kind. It's fucking primitive in 2017, the financial software equivalent of coding apps in assembly language.
So it's fast and lightweight?
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have Excel or Access creep in your organization, it is often because of stupid IT policies, where you don't have enough IT Staff to make good solutions, or IT rules are so strict that the staff isn't allowed to make such a solution.
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Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:4, Funny)
Or just not enough money. It's expensive to get a large financial software package. More expensive to craft your own. Excel is cheap (essentially free).
But what TFA asks for is a database, not a spreadsheet. Databases are hard.
Hard is expensive.
Expensive is bad.
Burma Shave.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Funny)
No. You're doing it wrong.
A database
is hard to do
That means that it's
expensive too
Burma Shave.
Or to fix the content...
Already have
a database
why is Excel
all over the place?
Burma Shave
Or
One data team
in fertile soils
could wipe you clean
of spreadsheet boils
Burma Shave
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Insightful)
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
Quoted for truth. The Excel plus copious macros and hackjob Access monstrosities of the world are terrible, terrible, things; but they exist because Office is actually pretty good at letting people who have subject matter expertise and subject matter problems bang out something resembling a solution without much IT or software engineering getting involved. This is also one of the reasons why Office has been so persistent.
You can(and taste dictates that you should) dislike the results; they are usually awful; but those sorts of systems grow up when people are forced to build their own tools because yours are nonexistent and/or so atrocious as to be effectively unusable. If you don't build it; your users will be forced to, and while they may do a decent job given the constraints of their tools and knowledge, it won't be pretty or maintainable.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Hear, hear. When someone who knows what they're doing can create a functional workflow prototype in an evening using a spreadsheet, yet having a working application with the same or less functionality requires months of taking requirements and development iterations, it's no wonder that people use the tools at hand for most of their information, even if developers think that doing this is a monstrosity.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:4, Informative)
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"well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem"
It's in 95% of the cases never a 'spreadsheet' problem, just people doing lists of any kind who apparently can't figure out how to use Tables in Word.
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to set up a table in Word. In Excel, the table is right there, ready to use immediately. Why should I waste my time and go to the trouble of formatting a table somewhere else?
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This is neither an IT Problem or a spreadsheet problem. I would think this falls more in line as a problem with poor Process Management and pure laziness to begin with, then Management's poor choices in their selection of (or lack there of) an ERP system.
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I would agree, and add that this is a human nature problem. Companies put people in place to solve problems, yet no person can be so well rounded as to solve all problems (HR people are hired for soft skills, not software skills). But then they are put in charge of building a process, and can't imagine a database solution, having never been trained in the dark arts of data, and therefore can't imagine that they should even call IT for help. In some instances when they do realize they need help, pride (I
Re:Excel is separated from other systems (Score:5, Funny)
just use BI software ... (penis breath)
Are you trying to make me BI-curious?
Spreadsheets are not a database (Score:5, Informative)
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I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming.
It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming.
Within the Amazon warehouse
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Management who have just spent millions on an ERP system that does not do what they thought it did always need Excel analysis of the underlying data. Also ERP is the place the data should be but it is not usually great at analysis. Anyone who demands that Excel be banned from the organization is quite clearly an incompetent twat.
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Yeah, let's take valuable company data and analysis and splatter it all over the organization in incompatible Excel crap. What well-positioned company wouldn't want to do this?
That drives me nuts (Score:2)
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It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users.
The model is brilliant, it's just said that the Excel implementation is restricted to first-order functions acting on atomic data types organized in a fixed-layout grid. None of these restrictions has to be be necessary.
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Completely true. Though now that developers are beginning to understand why a tool like Excel is good for the people using it, there's hope.
Maybe there's chance that someone invents a new development environment with the same benefits of the spreadsheet for non-programmers, but updated to take advantage of the recent advances in programming language theory regarding type checking and asynchronous/distributed computing.
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How robust and useable is that model? I could use something like that as a basis to develop EUD applications and development environments...
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A quick read makes it sound like they are reinventing functional programming.
If so: Lisp for accountants? Really?
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Because nobody understands how Access works (meaning regular office people). The amazement when you show them how a report they would spent a week generating in Excel takes less than a second in Access is palpable. There are better databases, but for people who are using Excel as a database they probably already have Access installed and ready to go. It's not bad for small databases.
Excel is an End-User Development tool (Score:5, Interesting)
Excel use by information workers doesn't follow the typical patterns of other application software.
Spreadsheets belong to the family of End-User Development software, a research tradition which has more in common with IDEs than with office suites. EUD focus on allowing end users to create automations without the need to understand the logic of classic programming languages, i.e. without learning a formal grammar nor having to follow the execution path of a program runtime in your head.
In spreadsheets, in addition to a simplified domain-specific programming language, you get a dead-simple modeling tool for your data schemas (with simple visual queries), and mixing the data and code in-place, which helps as much as your preferred debugger. End users usually don't get as powerful debugging tools as developers, and spreadsheets are typically the only environment where a clever power user has access to similarly powerful tools.
Just Finance? (Score:3)
Excel is the case in point use of Law of the instrument [wikipedia.org].
In engineering I've seen Excel used to share images, a database, run a production line with some VBA/oracle black magic integration.
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run a production line with some VBA/oracle black magic integration.
That is just so wrong... I have the overwhelming urge to hunt down and smack the person that would do such madness!
Remember kids, friends don't let friends use VBA.
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The GP doesn't like it so it must be bad.
Now, I've ditched complex formulas in favor of VBA a long time ago, probably around when Office 2007 got released. Stuff just works.
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Not so much, more the fact it can be embedded inside documents that are frequently sent around via insecure channels (ie email) and you have a huge security accident waiting to happen...
In most cases like this, excel is a very poor tool for the job but it just happens to be the only tool provided so they make do and eventually get so tied in to insecure and fragile practices that it's hard to get out again.
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What *exactly* is wrong with VBA?
If you have exhausted the spreadsheet features of Excel, and feel the need to use VBA, it's time to upgrade to more powerful numerical analysis software (Python, FORTRAN, Mathmatica, MATLAB, etc.). What you are trying to do has likely been done, you are just using the wrong tool and reinventing the wheel. The libraries in these software packages will be more elegant, faster, and more robust than anything you will create in VBA. If you can somehow manage to create a better program in VBA than with a real
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Excel is the case in point use of Law of the instrument [wikipedia.org].
In engineering I've seen Excel used to share images, a database, run a production line with some VBA/oracle black magic integration.
Behold! Oraxcel
Yes, this [oraxcel.com] exist
Data (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Data (Score:5, Insightful)
His simpler streamlined replacement wont give his financial planners the ability to plan.
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The real issue, comes down to communication and taking the next step. Lets face it Financial/modeling planning is actually complex business. It requires deep understanding and often quite a bit of experimentation and iteration over months or years. Once the model is established its less complex to implement. The problem is most tools that IT will want to use for an, entry/transaction -> ETL -> calculate -> ETL -> report, process are not tools that lend themselves to rapid iteration and use b
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Excel fills the nice.
It can also fill the awful just as well.
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If your system won't let you plan, get a new system.....or build one ground up if your process is that different from industry standards.
I've been in IT for years (early 90s) and have seen plenty of projects who's goal was to eliminate all of these smaller custom technology processes managed by the business and create or implement more robust tools to replace them. Sometimes those were planning tools, sometimes those were data management tools. But in the end, it was an improvement to their process (at a
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The macro features are very powerful, but also very fraught. They lure you in with their simplicity (record macro, anyone???) but then you find out that the pitfalls are such that you need to become a VBA expert to create anything reliable. And by then you are better off just programming in something "real". I've done... unspeakable... things in Excel - at first on my own initiative and later at the behest of managers who couldn't be talked out of it. It always turns out to be harder than initially thought,
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His simpler streamlined replacement wont give his financial planners the ability to plan.
We've had "little languages" for decades, what prevents us from using them in better environments than Excel?
Re:Data (Score:4, Insightful)
mporting and exporting and manipulating data
i.e. making the data talk.
This is exactly how you find out what a large amount of data is telling you.
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If you torture the data long enough, you can make it tell you anything...
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It sounds to me like he is simply looking to replace Excel
He was. TFA mentions he already switched. This article is just a clickbait title and an advertisement for "cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors".
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If you can't show (read persuaid) someone else what your data is saying, your analysis is effectively useless.
What would replace Excel? (Score:3)
Yes, Excel is a staple in work environments... but what software out there can replace it that is just effective? I know some consulting groups would love to replace it with their own, expensive solution. However, for 99.99% of what is out there, LibreOffice Calc, Numbers, or Excel can do the job well.
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It's definitely a workflow problem, but I suspect one of the problems is that Excel is in the middle of the workflow. It's fine for light-duty data exploration, prototyping, one-offs... things like that. But if you find that you are using Excel as glue, you are probably Doing It Wrong(tm) :)
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http://www.vfront.org/demo.php [vfront.org]
https://dadabik.com/ [dadabik.com] (not open source, paid solution)
https://formtools.org/ [formtools.org]
http://phpformgen.sourceforge.... [sourceforge.net]
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Sound like he wants a spreadsheet with real time data.
Which is something Excel (and probably most other spreadsheets) can already do, you just need to hook it up to the sources.
Perhaps a simple pivot table tool (which Excel can also somewhat do).
Excel has made IT Consultants a fortune (Score:2)
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It should also be stated that a reasonable Excel sheets is a lot (as in "a handful of magnitudes") cheaper than any custom-made solution that a consulting firm would build. And the Excel sheet would actually work.
As some point some Excel sheets become succesfull enough to outgrow their limits, and that's when you hire a consultancy firm to port it.
(FWIW, I've worked at such a consultancy firm; they mostly exist by overselling ridiculously overcomplicated solutions then running up double the budget).
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I thought Access seemed like a nice tool. Then I took a course and really learned it and realized that most of the things it could do were better done elsewhere. Oh, well - I try to target those brain cells when drinking now.
Then pay for something better (Score:2)
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If you don't provide your employees better tools for a task, they're going to keep\start using something that's easier for them to use.
Update for the times we live in....If you don't provide your employees better tools for a task, they're going to just use Excel.
The best tool (Score:2)
The Best tool is the tool you know how to use. If users are critical of database systems, CIOs should pay attention and find out WHY they want to do their work in Excel instead.
Javelin understands the arrow of time (Score:3)
Stop using Excel? DOUBLE DOWN on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's laughable to read any commentary from anonymous finance chiefs decrying Excel's inability to keep up with "x". These folks truly do not use Excel in any meaningful way. Truly.
Every business person in every industry I've ever worked in (telecom, pharma, housing, transportation, manufacturing) rely on Excel as the glue application for everything. I have to persuade people to use Word instead of Excel for actual documentation requirements, that's how reliant everyone is on this magical tool.
Actuaries use Excel almost exclusively to perform calcs for clients. I don't care who you work for, you're using Excel and not ProVal for the majority of your work.
Engineers use Excel for *everything*. What other application imports and exports to so many different formats, and allows any calculation you can dream up?
You write reports? You write complex reports? Try connecting your queries to Excel and let your end users twist the results on their own. You're not writing layouts any longer, and THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME.
Face it, orgs should roll it out and become Excel experts in house, and use it for as much as they can. For the value it delivers, it's dead-cheap and nobody has an app to match it.
--#
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Engineers use Excel for *everything*. What other application imports and exports to so many different formats, and allows any calculation you can dream up?
I can't tell whether you're a troll or just seriously deranged. Have you never heard of R, or python, or MATLAB, or Mathematica?
"...many different formats...", 99% of which are just other Microsoft-proprietary formats so who cares.
Engineering work in Excel is impossible to debug, excruciating to edit or modify, and guaranteed to go wrong if you blink.
And, yes, I've used all of the above tools, including Excel. I know better than to use Excel for anything that matters beyond a basic spread
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I don't know where you work, but engineers using Excel should have their licenses revoked. Excel is full of bugs and easy to make, yet difficult to find mistakes for complex calculations, hence the need to get rid of Excel.
...revolutionized accounting in the 1980s (Score:2)
Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s...
I thought this was about Excel, not VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3.
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This comment perfectly illustrates why it is very difficult to train computers to parse natural language. If some humans can't recognize that the context has shifted away from Excel and towards spreadsheets in general, how can you train a computer to do it?
Also... (Score:2)
Get rid of Excel? Good luck with that... (Score:2)
Pretty much every reporting/analytic implementation I have worked on always had a requirement to get the data out to an Excel-friendly format. It doesn't matter how fluid/flexible/beautiful of a UI you provide, they want the data in Excel. I think a lot of it is that is very simple to change values and do what-if analysis ("what would our material costs on widget X have to go down to get to a gross profit of Y%"). This is surprisingly difficult to do in implementations like Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting
an ERP system (Score:2)
Ah. Evidently these particular finance people are just now discovering ERP systems.
Next, they're going to complain that a monolithic system isn't really flexible enough and they need to move to a cloud based system.
And, hey! Excel integrates with Microsoft's cloud based ERP system. Full circle.
We discussed this back in 2005 (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2005, it was not about being on different systems, but there was an article entitled The subtle tyranny of spreadsheets and link https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org].
Welcome to the world of Shadow IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Did Anaplan, Workiva, and Adaptive Insights ... (Score:2)
collectively pay for this advertisement, or did just one of them fund this WSJ piece and the editors threw in the other names to make it look balanced? I'm guessing Anaplan Inc paid for it since their name was mentioned first and last.
Good advice. (Score:2)
Accountants love Excel (Score:5, Insightful)
Their multi billion dollar asset tracking system and SEC reporting system involves exchanging excel files. They made a great leap forward by using a common shared drive instead of emailing each other excel files.
They don't even have a version control system, to create an audit trail of changes. The process always starts with "Copy last month spreadsheet into a new name for this month". It is insane. But, on the other hand, had she been sane she might not have married me.
Adobe's finance chief (Score:3)
Google sheets? (Score:2)
Also, it reduces the problem of "did you get the latest version of the spreadsheet the boss edited today at 3:00 AM?" or the many slightly different versions of the same spreadsheet enabled by email and Excel.
Excel is data death (Score:2)
The problem isn't just that they are all using stale data, repeating each other's work, doing a bunch of clicking, etc. though that's all a colossal waste, the problem is that they don't know if it's right. Excel puts business logic (code) in many cells and one could be different than another, it's hard to peer-review, hard to debug, etc. You cannot do real version control on it, because the data changes all the time, etc. Logic which could be expressed in 20 lines of code become bazillions of counter-int
They need proper software (Score:2)
That's it.
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Pervasive UI problem in the industry... (Score:2)
I have felt the pain of being in various teams with plenty of appropriate software tools to keep everything in sync and not have a confused mess of data with muddied authority and progeny.
However, inevitably, the UI design is so crappy that people 'export to xls' and use spreadsheet offline to add little fields or discuss en-masse.
It's also a process issue. Inevitably people think too much about the contents of the fields, and another motivation for people doing xls is for them to add a column with some s
Not a problem (Score:2)
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it isn't just (or primarily) with ad hoc and custom analyses.
It is that regular business functions are run with these sheets all the time. Business types do this because the are familiar with the tool, and they can implement the process themselves without calling in a dev team.
And all of this is perfectly understandable. Would you call in an outside dev team, explain requirements, and then have to wait for an acceptable product to be produced, when you could do it yourself quickly?
This is inevitable unless considerable effort is expended by the organization to identify and pull these business functions into formal, administered, monitored systems.
A decree not to use Excel at all (if this is what it is) is stupid.
The emphasis should be on educating the business on treating these "normal function" spreadsheets as prototypes of the function that must be implemented formally going forward, and the necessary resources must be provided to make this happen, and suitable reward structures must exist to encourage businessmen to identify and bring forward these functions for proper automation. Without all of this this decree will be useless.
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And all of this is perfectly understandable. Would you call in an outside dev team, explain requirements, and then have to wait for an acceptable product to be produced, when you could do it yourself quickly? This is inevitable unless considerable effort is expended by the organization to identify and pull these business functions into formal, administered, monitored systems.
Also important is that once it's moved outside Excel they often lose transparancy and flexiblity. They can't step-by-step it through the cells, they can't easily simulate it on a set of test data, they can't try tweaking a formula and see how it turns out unless somebody did a lot of work to enable that. Getting the initial version out of Excel is only half the fun, it's making the result maintainable that's the challenge. We experienced somewhat the same here migrating from SPSS syntax to SQL, people that
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R, Python, ... if you want to spend money, SAS, SPSS etc
There are plenty of data packages out there for data analysis, the problem is that very few people know how to use it well. I'm going trhough the same problem with science data, scientists doing ANOVA and regression analysis in Excel files with 20k+ rows and 20k+ columns. Then at some point, even Excel will no longer do and then they wonder what to do, usually right in the middle of some critical time.
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Disparate interconnectable tools are the way it should be. This is the reason to have standards - even horrible undocumented standards like CSV.
Why should every single data system reinvent the wheel on manipulating that data?
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