
3 Reasons Why Replacing Microsoft Excel Is Worth Money to a Boss - rbanffy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/metabrown/2017/12/31/3-reasons-why-replacing-microsoft-excel-is-worth-money-to-a-boss/#66b5020a37a9
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ksk
>Your boss can avoid that, by replacing Microsoft Excel addiction with more
appropriate analytics tools and processes.

The problem is that excel is supremely flexible. You can do accounting,
budgeting, inventory, reporting, forecasting, graphing, etc for a small to
medium business from the same piece of software using basic formulas. I work
at a small business and sometimes our specialized tools limit us in some of
those areas, when you just want the ability to dump the raw data into excel
(easily) and do a simple formula calculation.

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siruncledrew
Most of the problems listed in the article are just side-effects of
spreadsheets in general (e.g. have to make formulas, build the sheet, add
notes, etc) and aren't just specific to Excel. The same also applies to
Numbers, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets. In this regard, the author's point
doesn't really stand.

Excel may be the most widely used spreadsheet software (going by estimation,
don't quote me on this), but it is far from perfect. There are plenty of
annoyances I've found while using Excel, and have actually enjoyed using
Google Sheets a lot to remedy some of them. The problem I see is that people
in business are ingrained with using Excel since it's what they have always
used. Excel is to corporations what the Ford F-150 is to America. Part of this
is thanks to .xls and .xlsx files. Unless there is fully-compatibility support
to seamlessly open these files in other software, it's a huge pain in the ass
to deal with inconsistencies and formatting from conversions (ex. transferring
from Excel to Google Sheets or vica versa). There is no widely used open
spreadsheet file standard (Yea, there's CSV/TSV, but how many business people
or non-analysts save their spreadsheets as those filetypes when emailing them
around), which really sucks when the potential for something better than Excel
is apparent if it could actually reach critical mass.

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Adamantcheese
At my current workplace we have a few workbooks that need to be updated any
time that our customer provides us with an update to them. Unfortunately they
never tell us what changed so we have to go through and redo all the changes
that we did previously and apply them to the new workbook. Then we have to
test if we didn't mess something up in the migration and whatnot; all in all
it takes upwards of a month between managerial overhead and the time it takes
to actually figure out where something got messed up. And there's no good diff
tool for excel documents which makes it incredibly frustrating to try and find
what one cell might be wrong between a working document and an incorrect
document. And then VBA for macros is basically impossible to understand
because any googling for it returns results for every other version of VB with
slight differences that don't work in Excel.

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p33p
Here are some links that may help solve your problems.

Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-
version...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-versions-of-
a-workbook-by-using-spreadsheet-compare-0e1627fd-ce14-4c33-9ab1-8ea82c6a5a7e)

Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard
since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior:

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-
mic...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-microsoft-
power-query-for-excel-6e92e2f4-2079-4e1f-bad5-89f6269cd605)

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Adamantcheese
Those would be great solutions but we're stuck on Excel 2007 and can't install
any newer versions or basically any software because of IT reasons.

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WorldMaker
Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems
an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some
modest sanity checks.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/3198497/office-2007...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/3198497/office-2007-approaching-end-of-extended-support)

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madmulita
I don't normally use Excel, or any of the other Office tools, and I constantly
argue my boss about the drawbacks I see with using them. The result is always
the same: "It's what everybody knows how to use".

Then, what I hate the most, I have to sit while they struggle to position some
object pixel perfectly in PowerPoint, or make the index numbers correct in any
Word list, or have to explain why Excel show rounding errors, etc.

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owlninja
Author should provide some alternatives..

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gebeeson
And that is really what I was hoping for - maybe something that I'd not heard
of or contemplated. Not even a suggestion.

