
Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs - petethomas
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601
======
mabbo
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 world, I have seen incredible innovation using it.
An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers
lives while serving in Afghanistan[0].

I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a
centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any
business.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190)

~~~
ajlburke
I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is
that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up"
from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the
original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over).

Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like
functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - but
it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication,
built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it
was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different
topic).

Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful
ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases.
Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building
simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a
spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed.
This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out
to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases.

In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my
career in business software has still mostly been about converting
spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base
level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.

~~~
sheetjs
> my career in business software has still mostly been about converting
> spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best:

> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS
> app still needs to be built.

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657)

FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries
to read and write spreadsheets ([https://github.com/sheetjs/js-
xlsx](https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx), demo
[http://oss.sheetjs.com/](http://oss.sheetjs.com/)) ended up garnering lots of
demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications

~~~
jstandard
> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS
> app still needs to be built.

It's a pithy quote, you'll get a very different reaction from a finance or
small to med-sized business professional.

Excel is the ultimate maker studio that actually lives up to the promise of
"build your own mini-app". I'm not saying it can't be improved on. It's just
that the core model of flexibility is so compelling, pushing everyone into a
SaaS app is invariably going to take away substantial power from the user.

~~~
sheetjs
Excel is an incredible swiss army knife when dealing with one person in one
location on one computer, but the warts start showing up when any of those
assumptions break.

One computer: once you decide you want to use your smartphone, for all but the
most basic sheets there are problems with Excel mobile preview, even with
Microsoft's official apps.

One location: Excel's lack of a universal time (showing different times in for
users in different timezones) have led to gnarly workarounds. There was an
attempt to correct for it in the XLSX format (cell type 'd') but it has its
own problems.

One person: Excel has no inherent sync strategy. You are forced to farm out to
email (and the inherent filename versioning nonsense) or use a system like
SharePoint (which has its own problems you notice when dealing with people in
different timezones across the world, like accidental file locking and data
loss)

~~~
jstandard
I hear you. I think One Computer and One Person issues have generally been
solved by Office Online or Google Spreadsheets. I can't speak to difficulty
around lack of universal time nor do I know how important of a requirement
that is to most companies.

Any solution, SaaS or otherwise, will have flaws. It might solve Excel's
weaknesses really well, but will likely lack its strengths.

Excel is still going strong in 2017 to a large degree because its strengths
continue outweigh its weaknesses and that people have found reasonable ways,
or add-on tools, to work around it's weaknesses.

It will be interesting to see in the coming decade if niche industry solutions
or an even more incredible swiss army knife were to come around and dethrone
the incumbent.

------
jasode
The phrases _" avoid data silos"_ and _" we want single source of truth"_ have
been used repeatedly about Excel misuse/abuse/overuse for 20+ years. The WSJ
story talks about the complaint but not about the underlying tension between
data redundancy vs data manipulation.

Excel endures because it's the non-programmer's REPL for data. Like a Lisp
REPL, using Excel is nimble and has an instant feedback loop. Click "A-Z" to
sort ascending, click "Z-A" to sort descending. Move/hide/freeze columns. If
one has intermediate-to-advanced skills, one can pivot the data on multiple
axis. None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can
match Excel's capabilities.

That's why the centralized systems like SAP ERP, Microsoft Team Foundation,
mainframe sytems, etc offer functionality to _export_ to Excel spreadsheets.
(Or they offer export to csv files -- which is 1 step removed from Excel.)
With MS TFS, you can even _re-import_ from Excel so in that case, Excel acts
as a sort of offline data-entry client for the project management tool.

One middle ground between Excel data silos and the utopia of a centralized
system is a shared document store like Sharepoint or Dropbox. The hierarchy
would be something like:

1) Excel spreadsheets emailed around. Lots of redundancy; uncertainty of which
version is canonical.

2) Excel xls file stored on Sharepoint with automatic version control.
Employees must have discipline to only email _links_ to the "one true"
spreadsheet and never attach the actual xls file in the emails.

3) The data that was in Excel is migrated to centralized system and all data
entry and reporting is done there. However, because the central systems are so
cumbersome, this abstraction "leaks" back out to Excel because of the highly
desired "export to Excel" functions! (This restarts the dreaded Excel "data
silos" complaint cycle all over again.)

There isn't an IT department in the world that can develop centralized IT
solutions fast enough to keep up with the ways employees slice & dice data.
That's why Excel is "overused".

~~~
gaius
_None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match
Excel 's capabilities._

You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the
best of both worlds.

~~~
petilon
Actually you run into the one of Excel's biggest problems when you do this,
namely "Multiple versions of the truth". Here's how that happens: The central
database often contains bad data. Users "fix" the bad data in their
spreadsheet. Excel doesn't have the ability to write the updated data back to
the database. Now everyone has their own versions of "the truth". There are
products that attempt to solve this problem by adding the ability to write
modified data back to the database. See for example Pebble Reports,
[http://pebblereports.com/features/](http://pebblereports.com/features/) but
this is a reporting program and does not have spreadsheet capabilities.

~~~
52-6F-62
My first question was going to follow the poster above, and you answered it
for me. I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It
shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?

Aside from that — what about MS cloud services? I mean, maybe that's not
appropriate for healthcare or certain businesses, but for others it allows
there to be a single source of truth if the workflow is correctly tuned, no? I
can produce a doc in my local instace, push to 365, edit remotely on the web,
have somebody else edit remotely, and sync it back to my local instance
without a hitch.

I use Office365 for that purpose regularly at my job. I'm a developer, but I
have regular communication with editors, producers, project managers, division
managers, operations managers, art directors, and so on. A lot of the
information we share is tabled and needs to stay updated, and editable by each
party involved. It's worked well for me in that regard.

Maybe others have had different experiences?

~~~
jerf
"I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be
too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?"

Well, more accurately, it _can_ write back to the database, but normal usage
of Excel won't _afford_ that result. Normal usage of Excel you have an
independent value.

It is also a dubious proposition as to whether we want people to actually
write back to the central database; you'd be one stray macro away from
disaster. You sorta want it if someone manually corrects something, but not if
they operate on it programmatically, and now we're making things really
complicated.

~~~
allenz
There shouldn't be any risk if you have version control.

------
ckastner
> A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel
> spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and
> performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the
> same process takes minutes.

Then I believe it should say stop _abusing_ Excel.

Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally
useful. If you're using it to manually collate data from 400+ sources, you're
doing it wrong.

~~~
jonnypickel
This is the point that's going to get missed a lot. In the corporate world
Excel is the proverbial hammer to nearly every use case involving data
manipulation, regardless of how well suited it is for the task.

 _Edit:_ I just noticed that I'm the third person to reply to you and we all
referenced hammers.

~~~
pessimizer
I don't know that Excel was the wrong tool for this task. I'm not sure why the
spreadsheets couldn't have been distributed and consumed automatically by an
Excel application, or at least by helper applications that were fed by and/or
into Excel sheets. An Excel spreadsheet is a good enough form; and I don't
think replacing one with a webform or pdf form would be any better.

edit: my favorite thing about using excel is that instead of spitting out an
answer, you can spit out an Excel sheet that shows a lot of the work itself,
therefore _partially explaining the answer_ to the people that have to consume
it. The product of your program can often be another program, giving the
person receiving the report the opportunity to tweak or add new parameters to
your output. Basically currying accounting calculations.

------
Gustomaximus
The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how
the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself.

Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on
it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application
with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and
reporting.

~~~
R_haterade
>its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.

<rant>

You wanna know what's even more useful? Code notebooks.

I store everything from my sql queries to my processing pipeline to my models,
and my vizualizations. Most notebooks have slide-show modes now so your
presentation to business stakeholders is simple to prepare as well, and with
the right plotting packages you can draw interactive charts that do all the
fancy stuff. And when it's time to update the analysis, you just re-run the
notebook.

But business analysts are too freaking lazy to just learn to write some python
or R, and they're perfectly happy to get paid to do the same task over and
over again when it comes time to making updates.

And don't get me started on source control.

</rant>

~~~
thinkling
Most business analysts who are pulling this kind of data have a finance
background. To say that they're "too lazy" because they don't want to do their
work using Python seems a bit harsh.

In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let
business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad
ones that bring the database server to its knees.

~~~
R_haterade
>In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let
business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad
ones that bring the database server to its knees

I'll take data warehouses for 600, Alex.

------
mschuster91
This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever.

In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority)
usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever...
especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely
means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel
without any due diligence, the staff looks at the software and decides it's
crap and continues to use Excel => CFO gets mad because no one uses the
expensive software.

If you don't believe me, just ask yourselves how Oracle, IBM and Accidenture
are still in business despite numerous highly expensive and publicized
failures. It's all due to CxO pampering (in addition to a bit of vendor lock
in).

~~~
sidcool
What's Accidenture?

~~~
mschuster91
"Nickname" for Accenture, an IT consulting/bodyshop famous for delivering
stuff at waaay less than acceptable quality (or not delivering at all). In
addition they're also known for exploiting their employees.

See also [http://exposingevilempire.com/](http://exposingevilempire.com/).

~~~
sidcool
Is it different from other giant IT services firms?

~~~
mschuster91
No, but Accidenture is the most known of the bunch. And the other IT "service"
companies, well, guess how they get their contracts...

------
b1daly
I'm only use spreadsheets here and there., bit this article has the kind of
grating stupidity that adds to the conceptual noise we are surrounded with.

To replace Excel with software X, you would have to deliver software that
would provide the Same kind of flexibilty. That is a very difficult kind of
software to develop!

One very basic and powerful aspect of excel is simply the fluidity of the
display. You can cram a lot of information onto a single screen, resize and
move rows/columns, use colors.

As apposed to a clunky web app interface that has low information density,
inflexible data scheme,and the crippled UX of a typical web app.

That's not to say that the example given in the article doesn't point out a
real problem. But I wonder if doing some custom UI and re-factoring while
building on the current system the users already understand wouldn't be a much
more cost effective strategy.

When I see the clunky interfaces that so many workers are saddled with these
days, it makes me sad.

~~~
Nicholas_C
I used to work for a finance department that tried to implement a fancy driver
based tool to replace an endless amount of spreadsheets. We spent so many
hours and I’m sure a lot of money on the software license and consultants who
built it and in the end it just wasn’t flexible enough.

------
submeta
> “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

This!

I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically
educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams
get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor
via search/replace), and if they are "very sophisticated" they save it in MS
Access, join tables, connect the dots, export back to Excel, analyse the data
via Pivot Tables etc. And they do these steps repeatedly, every week. Without
stopping and asking if there might be better solutions out there. (In German
IT curriculums they call this "Medienbruch" = "media discontinuity"?)

I have seen this in so many companies and thought to myself: This is an
excellent case for a consulting pitch. And I could literally transform their
work.

And I am not talking about selling data warehouse solutions with ETL processes
and the like.

Twenty years ago I realized I could do all these preprocessing and
transformations with Perl. Now I do these kind of things with Python and
Pandas etc. So there are so many solutions that are a huge improvement. Still
these departments do it with Excel/VBA/Access.

~~~
ryandrake
Don't forget the all-to-common scenario:

"Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2
likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and
Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to
PowerPoint."

So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting
their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then
someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific
presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same
story. Welcome to life as an office drone!

~~~
Nicholas_C
I used to work as a corporate financial planning analyst and this hit way too
close to home.

Then one executive who didn’t like the story would have one of his analysts
pull the same data in a slightly different way and adjust it. The executive
would then show it to the CFO and tell him that’s the real story. The CFO
would turn to you and ask why his number is different than yours. Then you
would spend hours with the analyst reconciling the data and building a
waterfall chart to send to the CFO to explain the difference.

Then if you’re really unlucky the CFO says he wants to see the data both ways
with a waterfall reconciliation every month.

------
jwdunne
I think the problem is they're using Excel as a database as opposed to a
spreadsheet. That's fine at small scale, it's easier to manage and even easier
to get going, but Adobe scale? They should advise "Stop using Excel for what
it's not".

------
baxtr
I’ve worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or
other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my
experience due to 3 reasons

\- excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don’t want
etc

\- speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe
because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying

\- analysis: It's easy to do some basic analysis without studying CS

~~~
rjtavares
I agree with those 3 reasons, but I wouldd add a fourth: easy to create your
own version of the truth.

I'm not implying this is due to nefarious reasons (though sometimes it is):
sometimes the official version of the truth is just not adequate.

~~~
tcarn
Definitely, great point. Tools like Tableau/Power BI make it very easy to get
a misleading version of the truth, since it can very easily include misleading
data points and/or make calculations in a fashion that leads the user to
misinterpret KPIs.

------
scraft
All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not
because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel,
far from it. I tend to see small, well suited, sheets being created in Excel,
and then iteratively new features get added

"Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month"

"Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency
values"

"As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a
list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put
the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both
places"

"When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically
update"

"We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have
an automated job for that"

Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the
job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of
interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs,
etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you
particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been
with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all
works.

But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over,
and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system.
They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in
improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new
features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain
about instead!

~~~
ryandrake
To be fair, this kind of unobstructed scope creep is how all software gets
"out of control," not just Excel sheets.

------
jimworm
"Stop using paper", says chief of a company that treats modified copies as if
they were originals, "if we all carved our work on to this big stone in the
middle of the courtyard then we'd be rid of our paper problems".

~~~
tpeo
"Wall Street is investing into the new pyramids. Here is why."

------
throwaway2016a
It is amazing how many simple tasks at a company can be done with Excel that
as programmers we often write custom code for. When all you have is a
hammer...

At the same time. I have seen banks transfer money between branches by
literally FTP transferring an Excel file. At some point there has got to be a
better way. At least use SFTP :)

~~~
pythonaut_16
I've thought about this before. Does it mean that our libraries aren't good
enough? Do we just not know how to use them?

I often wish there was an intermediate between writing a fully custom piece of
software for something and using excel. This about how many times you've
worked on a web service (or other technology) and how much of the code is
basically identical to every other webservice in that technology minus some
unique data models and a few functions of custom logic.

------
fragsworth
Just something I discovered recently that entirely takes care of the problem
if you have ONE PERSON who knows how to code: Google Sheets with the
IMPORTHTML() function.

You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and
pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then
in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML
function. It populates your spreadsheet automatically, and then you can show
graphs and other various things. And it will update on its own!

There you have it! Single source of truth! And you still get to use a
spreadsheet!

It's a fucking beautiful, elegant solution to the entire "Excel problem" that
I don't see enough people using.

Instead they're going with enterprise 3rd party "solutions", like Anaplan. Who
knows how much money they're blowing because the execs don't know tech...

~~~
roadnottaken
Unless I'm missing something, this only provides a way to display data from a
database. But users cannot _write_ to the database via the Google Sheet, and
it thus doesn't solve the problem...

~~~
fragsworth
Oh god you're right, I just re-read the article and realized what they're
doing now.

It didn't even occur to me that anyone would use Excel _as the database_. Holy
hell. Nevermind.

Still, it shouldn't be hard to convert Excel to an SQL database. Then you dump
to CSV, and use ImportHTML to have a spreadsheet be your source of
information.

~~~
Amezarak
Excel can use databases as a data source, there's no need for all your extra
steps.

------
nindalf
This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine
article [1].

[1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

~~~
lvoudour
It sure does smell like a PR assisted attack on excel in favor of enterprise
solutions

~~~
sailfast
This is true, but, I also clicked because of the title. Well baited trap.

------
rahimnathwani
The title is overblown. There's a push to stop using Excel as:

* the single source of truth for a set of primary data

* the mechanism by which regular (i.e. repeated) reports and analysis are conducted

But it overlooks the fact that:

* Excel has, for many years, had real-time integration to pull data from many systems (not just 'Export to Excel', but the ability to pull data via ODBC connectors). I've used this, e.g. to pull trial balances from Sage into Excel for custom, but repeated, financial reporting.

* You can't beat Excel as a prototyping tool, or for ad hoc analysis from disparate data sources (without a huge learning curve for the people we're talking about). Telling finance/accounting professionals not to use Excel is like telling designers to use D3.js instead of Illustrator. D3 might integrate better with data sources, and be easier to version control and share etc., but for a quick sketch you'll use Illustrator.

From the title, you'd assume these 'Finance Chiefs' were expecting none of
their staff would even need Excel installed, after some transition period, but
this isn't the case. There's always some lag between the needs you have, and
the capability of more structured tools.

------
flarg
I've worked with customers to setup support units specifically for Excel,
helping their organisations develop and validate Excel spreadsheets and
consider migration to more robust solutions when the time is right. As much as
I dislike the general use of Excel there is an inescapable fact, Excel is a
great source of bottom up innovation and ideas from non programmers which we
should endeavour to capture and not just forbid.

------
blunte
The issues raised in this article are far less about failings of Excel but
rather typical failures of business to plan long term and put effort/resources
into comprehensive solutions.

------
snksnk
Don't blame Excel if your processes suck. Excel is a tool, namely a Swiss army
knife to edit and present data that is commonly used in business. It can be
very powerful if you know what you are doing.

~~~
bbarn
Swiss army knife is a good analogy. Sure, it does lots of things, but if you
want to do really big work, you'll probably want a chef's knife, or a saw, or
a pair of scissors, not miniature versions of each designed to fit in a small
package.

That said, it's a great tool to survive in the woods :)

------
linearithmic
One reason why Excel should never be used for anything real is because it
lacks type safety. For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one
of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will
just ignore that entry. There are lots of other problems related to type
safety as well.

~~~
ZenoArrow
For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was
mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore
that entry.

There are ways around that. Here's something I just put together as an
example:

=EXACT(COUNT(A2:A6),COUNTA(A2:A6))

That will only return true if all the cells in range A2:A6 contain numbers.

There are other approaches that would work, if that doesn't suit you.

------
wiradikusuma
As the founder of my own startup, I'm forced to use Excel to do financial
projection, etc, essentially all materials for my pitch deck. The only thing
that worries me is accidentally doing something wrong without knowing what has
changed -- stupid things like accidentally pressing Spacebar and Enter on an
important cell. Because of this, I keep looking Undo just to make sure my last
step is what I intended to do.

I use IntelliJ and Git, so you know what I'm missing.

------
fiatjaf
What should we use, then?

I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can
input arbitrary structured data.

After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is
structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and
combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible
to come up with the schema, write a software based on that schema and then
give it to the non-tech people.

~~~
rjtavares
Teach people how to use excel properly:

\- treat inputs and outputs separately

\- always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles,
basic vlookups for relationships, etc.)

\- use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the
pivot tables.

EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but
I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the same...

~~~
froindt
My current role is at a large company, and a significant portion of my work is
getting Excel reports which are broken and fixing them. Most I've never seen
working. Some reports have been broken for years but need to be resurrected.

To add a couple more:

\- Use actual tables. (Select data+headers, Insert -> Tables -> Table). In
most cases the data is tabular but not formatted as a table. Making this one
change makes the formulas self-documenting, and rather than selecting rows
2:5000, it will automatically accommodate more data as it's added. Tables can
also be named (click in the table, Table Tools [Design] -> Properties -> Table
Name). E.g. tbl_sales. This allows nice formulas like

    
    
        =SUM(tbl_sales[Sales])
    

or

    
    
        =SUMIF(tbl_sales[Region],"West",tbl_sales[Sales])
    

At a certain point, it really needs to be SQL, but between this and pivot
tables you can greatly extend the time before a database is needed.

\- Add a sheet with instructions. Explain hiccups which may be encountered,
and how to fix them.

\- Add comments to VBA. There is about 1 person at my facility (other than me)
who adds any comments at all. Most use the Macro Recorder then add in the
loops and logic as needed. Makes it really tough to figure out.

\- Protect cells which hold calculations. I recently saw a spreadsheet which
has been giving sub-optimal output for _years_ because the ranges used in a
function were messed up and copied down every week.

\- Use the built-in styles (Home -> Styles). Same goes for Word (Heading 1,
Heading 2, etc.). It makes spreadsheets way more straightforward to read if
there are some cells using Explanatory, Input, and Note styles, and it's less
abrasive to read. I particularly like the Input style because you can tell
users "You'll only need to update the orange cells".

\- Use multi-line formulas. Alt+Enter while editing a cell allows multiple
lines on a single formula. You can also improve the readability by adding four
spaces at the start of the new lines. E.g.

    
    
        =SUMIFS(tbl_sales[Total_Sales],
            tbl_sales[Month], "Jan",
            tbl_sales[Region], "West")

------
ThinkingGuy
"If I increase the page number, our sales go up. I'm on to something.."

[http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12](http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12)

------
bitwisebob
While we're talking about Excel:

Are there any good tools available for version control and/or diffing of
spreadsheets?

If my coworker updates a formula in cell E3 and emails it to be, is there any
way for me to know what changed?

~~~
will_pseudonym
Spreadsheet Compare is built into Excel/Office. It's a relatively unknown tool
since it came out in 2013.

See: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-
Spre...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spreadsheet-
Compare-f2b20af8-a6d3-4780-8011-f15b3229f5d8)

------
AmericanOP
Find me a cloud database with a good GUI for read/write and I'll get off
excel.

Databases are meant for tech stacks, not working with lists.

------
cjlars
Put simply, Excel is excellent as a terminal node in any data pipeline, but
poor as an intermediate node. Open speadsheet -> human plays with data ->
human makes decision = good. Open spreadsheet -> human plays with data ->
automated process pulls data further along in data pipeline = bad.

------
ninjamayo
Like others said in here people like and use Excel because it is a flexible,
visual, programming language. We haven't got alternative solutions for all the
people who want to program like that. Instead more and more companies come up
with very rigid, workflow based systems who actually haven't got the freedom
Excel has. The only proper attempt in solving this problem has been made by
people like Bret Victor but nothing commercialized at least as I am aware of.
Accounting, finance and even data processing / analytics software companies
still live in the Middle Ages in terms of user interactivity and flexibility
which is why a lot of us resort to programming languages.

------
hayksaakian
“Excel just wasn’t designed to do some of the heavy lifting that companies
need to do in finance,” said Paul Hammerman, a business applications analyst
at Forrester Research Inc.

Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan
Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.

The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource
management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE . This lets
accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often
without additional training.

\---

reads like a "submarine

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
ferdterguson
Python is my day job and I'm very fluent in the common data science tools like
Pandas, but you'll hardly ever catch me using Pandas because Excel is just so
much easier for 2d data.

The thing is, I never use Excel because the data I work with every day is
almost always multidimensional, so I work with xarray[1]. It drives me crazy
to see coworkers using Excel for things that it is _not_ suitable for and
having crazy solutions like multiple tables per sheet, multiple sheets,
multiple files or other hacks to describe another dimension of data.

[1] [http://xarray.pydata.org](http://xarray.pydata.org)

------
killjoywashere
I think "don't use Excel" is the wrong solution. The answer is to develop some
clear metrics around when to migrate off Excel. We use some pretty big
spreadsheets, and they're fine for the intended purpose.

------
markpapadakis
I was toying with this idea in the past, where cells would support, in
addition to primitives(numbers, strings, whatever) and functions, a new type
which would be identified by a reverse domain name notation path/key (e.g
org.hr.employees.cnt), and optionally a comma separated (key-value) pairs as
arguments.

Whenever a value for such a unique (key, arguments) cell would be required,
the application would collect all such that need updates -- or, you could
click a button to update them all --, create a message that would contain all
paths and arguments, and auth info (each user would require to authenticate
with some centralized system, so that the auth key would be used for that RPC,
and that the service could check for authentication and authorization ), call
out to some service and get values for each of those cells (value could depend
on the authenticated user, or could even be denied depending on privileges ).

Furthermore, the application would cache each such cell value (auth key,
resource path, arguments digest, value) and it would periodically update them,
or do so on demand (so that you can use it say on a plane, and refresh them
when you land). That’s the gist of it, but there’s more to it and there are
some optimization opportunities I am ignoring here, but it could work.

Then again, for all I know, there are already such services, or apps that kind
of do this sort of thing.

------
stevebmark
Huh, I thought only TechCrunch was the advertising "news" secret arm of
Silicon Valley investors? I didn't realize the WSJ did advertising "news"
pieces also.

------
sandGorgon
After building a couple of years of financial systems, I have a hypothesis -
if you could build a Jupyter Notebook with an editable spreadsheet view that
is backed by a database and has something like Atom editor Teletype's CRDT
(conflict free replicated data types) to enable collaboration...that would be
an Excel killer.

Incidentally, there are a lot of people who move from Excel to Salesforce !
Because of the ability to program it like an Excel sheet.

------
rdiddly
Pretty much every CRUD app I've ever written was to replace something that was
already being done in Excel, and the reason was always to get more of one or
more things a RDBMS gives you. So I can say this from a knowing place: good
freaking luck replacing Excel's other capabilities. 30 years of work by
thousands of Microsoft devs is not easily replaced. It's like a moat around
their business that they built by brute force.

------
c3534l
Accountants invented spreadsheets. Programmers made electronic spreadsheet
programs. The reason why spreadsheets are so popular among otherwise not
technically people is because it was developed by business people over the
course of centuries.

Unfortunately, if you're not technically inclined and someone gives you a big
hammer, at a certain point you're gonna have to stop hammering everything you
encounter and learn how to use a screwdriver.

------
pcsanwald
When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on
a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back
and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it
kept the analysts happy, who were all masterful excel users and thus very
efficient and happy with it.

Joel Spolsky's essay "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" comes to
mind.

------
alexilliamson
Something that almost always gets left out of these discussions is how quickly
you can spin a new dataset into a highly polished, ready-to-print-for-
executive-review report _IF YOU HAVE MASTERED EXCEL HOTKEYS_. For context, I
have meaningful experience doing data analysis using various combinations of
SQL, python, ruby, R/tidyverse, and excel with lightning-fast fingers. In a
previous role, I regularly needed to summarize new datasets to executives, and
I found that nothing was quicker and more flexible than the following
workflow: copying and pasting raw data into an unformatted "data" sheet,
creating a new sheet from a well-formatted template, and quickly writing
whatever "SUMIFS" prototypes I needed then filling out the rest of the sheet
by copying those formulas across cells.

Often excel users are stereotyped as having error-prone, sporadic workflows
where they are often mistakenly writing over raw data, etc. And that is often
a valid stereotype. However, I believe that there exist scenarios where excel
is part of the optimal workflow.

------
wimagguc
I'm on the market for another startup idea and one of the most ubiquitous
advice I'm hearing nowadays is that "there's a startup in every Excel sheet".

From that perspective WSJ is doing a great job in making the bed for these
ideas: startups will eventually want to sell to those "Finance Chiefs" which
is never an easy job.

~~~
osullivj
I'm in London too, doing a bootstrapped Excel startup. See my profile for
contact details.

------
VikingCoder
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
-African Proverb

Desktop apps like Excel are fabulous at letting you work alone with data in
front of you.

But they are a shitstorm of horror when you try to work with other people,
collecting data from multiple places. And sure, Office 365 is a step in the
right direction, but it's not nearly enough. Google Sheets is slightly better,
but it's still not enough.

To be frank, the same way that "anyone can do SQL," we've fallen into a trap
of thinking "anyone can do Excel," and it's just not true. And no amount of
improving the commercial product Excel will make it work for businesses like
they need, in my opinion.

At some point you need to hire engineers, mathematicians, statisticians,
process engineers, business analysts, etc., to help you manage your data.

Asking people to "Learn Excel" in order to replace a real team of qualified
domain experts is folly.

------
laughfactory
Excel is remarkable, yes, but I'd argue that given its nature pretty much
every reasonably complex workbook can be expected to have at least one bug.
Having worked with them a lot in many different contexts, I've seen just how
easily errors are introduced and I think they should never be used for
research or finance where the cost of errors is high. At it's core the issue
is that it's really hard to create variations and tests which can tell you if
something is wrong... Much harder than it is to do this in a normal
programming paradigm. Yes, the barrier to entry is lower, but the trade-off is
much increased error rate and ongoing brittleness. Even if it's "right" at one
point there's no guarantee it will be right in the future. What if someone
copies/pastes data into a crucial worksheet and misses a column? It's so
incredibly easy to screw up!

------
beezle
This really sounds like another case of whats old is new again. In a way, I
think it speaks a bit to the obsolecence of what used to be 'systems
professionals' that things have swung so far into the end user domain.

If the finance team (and I have been part of one early in my career at a major
conglomerate) is doing essentially the same repetitive analysis on periodic
data sets, it is their bad for not reaching out to their systems people for a
better way. Those types of reporting can be canned at a much earlier level and
output generated/delivered in the desired format directly to the end users.
And nothing precludes still making data available for new types of analysis.

Excel is great for small operations, ad hoc stuff and just quick and dirty
work (a REPL of sorts as others have said). But not as a primary/crucial
reporting tool for large operations.

------
Yhippa
> “You’re still going to use Excel for the things you’re not using a tailored
> solution for,” he said.

I was shocked to hear about my old company still using Excel heavily for key
business operations. I think those are the ones that should be replaced by
bespoke software.

On the other hand what likely happens is you need a way to quickly perform
some analytical task and your company doesn't have the process or speed to
whip up some software quickly. After seeing how a lot of Fortune 500 companies
work I'm not sure they ever will with compliance and other regulations in the
way.

Excel is very accessible and will probably be the way businesses whip up
analyses in the face of business fire-drills unless they have software
engineers embedded in their teams or they get their current staff to learn how
to code.

------
otakucode
This is everywhere. This is the reason I say that every company and
organization, whether they realize it or not, needs software engineers. The
things that grow (and they do grow rather than being built) in the absence of
access to software engineers are overly complex and fragile.

~~~
ksk
Do software engineers want to work on these problems though? IME, we all love
to work on problems one step higher than our current level.

------
smallnamespace
Have seen Excel derivatives pricers that ran long Monte Carlo simulations
(yes, RAND() is often good enough) that took several minutes -- press F9 for a
new estimate of a price, as well as simplified stripped-down pricers that got
within 0.001% of our real internal pricing system but was nicely laid out and
explainable to clients.

The only thing that Excel is awkward at is unlimited recursion. For everything
else, if you can't turn your computation into a nicely laid-out spreadsheet,
then you probably don't understand your problem well enough to explain to
others.

Had a fun time doing many of the Euler problems in Excel, even though they
theoretically many require recursion. Oftentimes I got the answer more quickly
and easily than in Python.

------
yeukhon
I used to be in the camp “oh you know Excel and PowerPoint, ahah!”

But working full time and having to create Excel spreadhseets on a regular
basis as an engineer (mainly for budgeting and capacity plannig, but also do
some schedule/timeline display), I have to say once you know how to cross
reference things in Excel, life saver...

Automating spreadsheet creation has helped save hours of manual recompiling
every quarter (do this Python is pretty pleasant). Yes. The scrolling and
wrapping really sucks, but nonetheless everyone understands excels. I have
been given tours and free trials from SaaS companies to try their AWS
budgeting interface. They are great for some (like some prettt graph), but
just not easy and flexible at all.

------
nmstoker
"Keep checking plurals readers tell headline writers" springs to mind as a
response!

But, joking aside, Excel is the most amazingly useful and adaptable tool but
it's incredible how many obvious improvements have been left out. Parts of it
are stuck in the stone age. As others have mentioned, version control and
information flow are hugely limited with it and there's a real feeling that it
went backwards for things like charting (I suspect it's partly that other
methods are now more intuitive). And why on earth don't they do something
(anything) to make pressing F1 not be such an annoying experience...

------
abricot
Sounds more like they should get a proper ERP and/or HR system to solve this.

------
leroy_masochist
Having read the article, I feel as if the headline is a bit misleading and
clickbaity.

A more accurate headline in terms of the article's contents would be something
like, "Stop Using Excel For ERP, CRM, And Workflow-Based Use Cases, Finance
Chiefs Tell Staffs". Or to be extra snarky, "Follow Known Best Practices,
Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs".

Not that attention should not be paid to the article's subject matter -- there
is SO MUCH wood to chop in terms of helping enterprise customers run their
companies better and/or get rid of inefficiency and general jankiness.

------
rconti
_Shudder_

This reminds me of my 2 months working for a Big 4 accounting firm in,
basically, SOX auditing.

We mapped out controls on our little 14" laptop screens using excel
spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows and hundreds if not thousands of
columns.

I'd say we were writing novels in Excel but, to be honest, there were probably
far more words than the average novel contained.

Talk about using the wrong tool for the job -- and using low-paid monkeys on
inadequate equipment rather than developing a proper application for the task
(or paying someone else to do the same).

I'll never look at excel the same way again.

------
mrmondo
As someone in a systems / ops engineering role it frustrates me endlessly when
someone sends me information / data in the form of an excel spreadsheet or a
word document.

My only are the applications slow and buggy (unless I’m guessing you’re
running Windows?) the file format is very hard to work with / from if you want
to do anything with it outside the vendors application, data quickly becomes
stale and it’s not easy to populate automatically using standard tooling let
alone share the information generated there from in an accessible, digestible
format.

------
chatmasta
How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?

~~~
fiatjaf
what are they advertising?

~~~
Bishonen88
"Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan
Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.

The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource
management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE. This lets
accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often
without additional training.

Adobe switched to Anaplan early last year and many of the tasks previously
performed in spreadsheets are now done in the system, maintaining “one source
of truth,” Mr. Garrett said."

------
jujaro
Some time ago Telco carriers used to keep their plant assets data in Excel,
PDF, Autocad, images, paper etc. I work for a company that does software to
centralize all that info in a database. Once they start using the software the
big issue is that they want to keep different versions of the same data all
centralized. Sort of a version control system, the complexity of maintaining
data integrity in such environment is massive. It is like they would like to
return to a decentralized system where they can do whatever they want with
their data.

------
Havoc
That's not happening.

There is currently simply no viable substitute. (And don't tell me
LibreOffice). Excel's mindshare is off the charts in the finance world.

Even if LibreOffice was anywhere close - it wouldn't matter...the finance
staff wants what they already know & since they approve the $$$ they usually
get what they want.

For certain tasks other applications may be more suitable, but as a general
swiss army knife it's here to stay

We use Google sheets at work too - almost exclusively for shared trackers
though which don't require any serious functionality.

------
sailfast
This article appears to be about how senior leadership wants to pay people
that are not financial analysts to create reports that can then somehow be
used by financial analysts (probably after exporting to CSV so they can work
in Excel?)

This sounds great if you know exactly what reports you need and have the
resources to build them, but I'm not really sure how this kind of initiative
means "stop using excel". This article is advocating for a solid API / data
management / data catalog program from what I'm reading.

------
Schwolop
In my enterprise, PowerBI, Flow, and Powerapps are the microsoft products
helping to move data out of excel, or at least helping to make it visual and
shareable.

If any of those products grows a more user friendly model for _thinking_ about
how to do things (Flow is arguably the closest) they could revolutionise how
things are done here. PowerBI has enormous power to express data as stories,
but the technical hurdles are still high. It's not _harder_ than excel, but
there's a competency cliff.

------
beefield
One step forward to manage spreadsheets would be if there was a way to enforce
relational database table looking sheets. I mean, you should be able to lock a
sheet in a way that anything you enter to a column must be of same type, you
can't addd random formulas wherever, but you need to add data one row at a
time, if you miss primary key, no other changes are allowed, if you have a
defined formula for a column, it is guaranteed to be the same in all data rows
etc.

------
wils1245
>Kayla Davis, who runs financial planning at ABM Industries, relied on Excel
to pull data from a motley of disparate accounting systems

"Motley of disparate accounting systems" is your problem, not Excel. Heavy
Excel use/misuse by end analysts is a symptom of poor data practices, not a
cause. If Excel is being used to compile and distribute
complicated/big/important reports, it's extremely likely they lack better and
more coherent tools and data sources.

------
petervandijck
In our 150-people team as part of a 1,500 people company, we use a ton of
Excel, but a significant part of our structured data is in
[https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com), which I can't recommend high
enough.

It combines the structured-ness of a database with the ease of use of a
spreadsheet. And it lets you slowly evolve your datamodel (we adjust
fields/tables every few months and it usually only takes 15 minutes).

------
deusofnull
Sounds like their workflow is the problem, not their tool. I'm no shill for
Excel, but it is without a doubt powerful and can be quite programmatic. Maybe
Excel could get a plugin system like Atom or VS Code or Sublime that could
handle integration with centralized platforms / databases.

Just wondering: can you make an API call / ORM query to a database from within
Excel macros? How much I/O can you do with macros?

~~~
zbentley
You can do basically anything I/O within an Excel macro (VBA script):

You can talk to a database: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-
new-databas...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-new-database-
connection)

Interact with the filesystem:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-
text...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-text-file-
line-by-line-in-vba)

Open arbitrary sockets, with some caveats:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-
winsock...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-winsock-
event-handling-in-visualbasic)

And more!

------
alkonaut
Doesn’t excel allow using any data source for the data? So you can e.g
populate a table from a web service/database etc?

The thing with excel is that it’s repl-like and lets you sketch up a solution.
If users could build more data driven apps (I don’t doubt it’s possible but it
should be _easy_ ) like those Access popularized then you could start off
using sketch data and finish with using a “single source of truth”.

------
tolger
There are things that Excel is good for and some that it's not. This article
seems like it's blaming the tool instead of the people who are using it
incorrectly.

Also I laughed when one of the complaints was "Older versions of Excel don't
allow multiple users to collaborate on the same document". Well, is that
Excel's fault, or should they just go and get the latest version?

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
IKR. And "On the other hand, older versions of Google Sheets, well, didn't
exist"

------
muxator
I used to joke with my colleagues that you never have to write "Excel" in your
CV :)

Now that I am grown up a bit, I recognize it can be useful. The real life
problem, for me, is recognizing when comes the moment to stop sending
spreadsheets by mail and write software, instead.

Or buy it. Lots of people buy sofware, they tell me. Why don't they feel the
pleasure of crafting every single bit by themselves?

------
TomMasz
In my experience the problem with Excel is it gets used as a database often
because there are more Excel gurus than DB gurus. The Excel guru in my
department had to update his version of Office to 64-bit and add RAM because
our spreadsheets were getting too large. Even he admits that Excel isn't the
best choice for this but we laid off all the Access/SQL people years ago.

------
djhworld
I don't think the article is suggesting stop using spreadsheets - it says some
companies are adopting "cloud" based solutions that offer collaboration
features and other tools.

Not sure if these cloud offerings have the same breadth of features that Excel
has as I've never used them, but Workviva seems to be some sort of cloud based
spreadsheet and analytics tool.

------
tmaly
I have produced thousands of reports in excel format in the financial services
industry. If there were an easier api to just have an excel sheet pull/push
data from/to a web service, this would be the best of both worlds.

The interface is very familiar for many professionals, its just a matter of
coordinating and working off a the same data.

~~~
osullivj
My side project does this by serverizing Excel sheets. Take a look at my
profile for links.

------
jokoon
Shouldn't you be able to do the same thing R does with excel?

I mean at some point if you cannot teach everyone a programming language, you
can at least give them some tool that can do a similar job.

Teaching programming is so expensive, the money has always been into making
programming just easier and easier.

------
jasonmaydie
They had me until the part where they complained about using old versions
excel. Then upgrade it, and while you are at it upgrade your windows XP
machines too. Why are these companies complaining about using old software
when they are the ones who are always last to upgrade?

------
kfk
The problem is very simple. Everybody understands how to sum cell A1 with cell
B1 and have a result in cell C1. Summing arrays, though, like in an R
dataframe, is much more difficult to understand. You don't see it and you need
to train your brain to think in SQL terms.

------
evantahler
There are lots of great tools to solve the single source of truth problem. foe
example, I've used Looker (which is connected to our data warehouse) to spit
out JSON feeds or CSVs which excell and google sheets can live-import.

Doing this gives us the best of both worlds

------
osrec
Deploying Excel in production is like deploying a beadboard in a piece of
consumer electronics. You just give away too much control to keep your
deployment robust. Having said that, Excel is an excellent tool - just not for
everything under the sun!

------
k3a
Paid advertising? I use LibreOffice and it fullfills all my needs.

I understand, there may ve different needs in big corporations, of course. But
that doesn't mean "everyone should stop using Excel and buy our cloud SW",
sigh.

------
Myrmornis
In the article, and in these comments, are people distinguishing between Excel
and Google Sheets, or are they lumping them both together as “excel”? Where I
work I don’t think anyone uses Excel, but Google Sheets is common.

------
fpisfun
I hate Excel, can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm a big Google sheets
fan when it's used with their apps scripts. You can do a lot using the sheet
as a data store combined with functional JavaScript.

~~~
dbg31415
Look, I hear you... I love Google Docs over Microsoft Word... and for simple
things I like Google Sheets.

But given how much shit is in Excel, and how many edges cases have just been
worked out already in Excel... man sometimes it's just nice to have Excel.

Want to de-dupe a list? There's a button for that in Excel. (I know there are
tools... but look my point is just that it's so much easier in Excel.)

Want to convert some list of dates that were saved based on a 1904 calendar
over? Easy, Excel even offers to do it when you paste. Google docs? Yeah not
so much. You're left doing this by hand... 4 years and 1 day off... ugh.

Want to see all the formulas and know how they work? You get only so much
visibility into the apps for Google Sheets... I don't really want to run code
/ grant access to things unless I know what they are doing. Not keen on adding
3rd party functionality that may be sending my data back to the mother ship.

I love me some Google Sheets... but just saying when I need to get shit done,
Excel is usually a slightly more robust experience.

------
gumballhead
“I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and
exporting and manipulating data.“

That is literally all I did when I was a financial analyst and is how I became
a programmer. This should be automatic, I thought.

------
braywill
"[Microsoft] wouldn’t comment on what share of [Office 365] customers are
using the program for financial analysis and accounting.

Good, I would be concerned if they knew exactly what each customer was using
their software for.

------
supergreg
I remember one IronPython book that made a spreadsheet application that
allowed the user to use python itself for the spreadsheet functions. I think
it was a great idea.

The software itself was available for download for a time.

~~~
sundaysailor
There was a startup called Resolver Sytems pursuing this. They meanwhile
abandoned it in favor of a different project but did open-source it:
[https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-
spreadsheet](https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet)

------
known
We can use Excel as long as we are aware of its limits/loopholes e.g.
[http://0.30000000000000004.com/](http://0.30000000000000004.com/)

------
justthisguy
Sounds like misuse of excel rather than don't use it.. no mention of
powerpivot , query tool or connections. also there is much more to consider
when switching to a cloud solution.

------
dizzy3gg
I worked at nPower, in MIS, they used to link about 16 spreadsheets together
because they "didn't like" SQL. These are one of the UKs big six energy
companies.

------
jimnotgym
One killer missing feature in Excel for me is proper UTF-8 support. Connect
Excel to your db, save a csv file to import to your website and say goodbye to
your umlauts!

------
nautilus12
Why does this feel so much like sponsored content for Workiva?

------
justthisguy
I think all the features he listed as reasons to switch away from excel are in
excel. IMHO the issue there may be more training, process and good data
management.

------
robert-wallis
It seems like using Google Sheets or the online Excel is the answer. Single
source of truth, collaboration, and keep the same fundemental tools.

------
dagaci
Workiva's stock price has jump to an all time high after the wall street
journal article. This is great news for them ;)

------
muthusk
This CFO should talk to CIO - before making such a blunt statement. So one
silver bullet to solve all the problems.

------
sbr464
Feels like an ad

~~~
sus_007
it's an add in deed.

------
px1999
This is just an ad for workiva, right?

------
raides
It's weird how no one can adopt office365 and online Excel like they can with
Google sheets.

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banku_brougham
No one has yet mentioned the shortcut keys, so I'll add this dimension.

When you show up to work on wall street, your new buddies will yank the mouse
out of your machine and remove the F1 key. Then you can begin your
apprenticeship with a fresh perspective.

The point is, you can be incredibly productive in excel against a very large
problem space. It can't handle GB datasets, but once you have filtered down to
a manageable size you can answer questions via ad-hoc analysis, automate
financial reporting documents, solve multivariable regressions, run machine
learning algorithms (see 'Data Smart') etc. with aplomb. I understand the
objections to the data model and its inappropriate uses, but excel can take
raw data from disparate sources to finished documentation for regulatory
requirements and helps you automate most of that -- I don't think the finance
industry is going to move away from it. I certainly don't perceive an
understanding of the costs involved with building a different way.

>“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

I hear this complaint all the time from business leadership, Mr. Garrett
doesn't seem to understand that extracting/munging/preprocessing and then
analyzing data is inextricable from the end product which is visibility and
understanding at the business leader level. There isn't a follow-up to say Mr.
Garret is hiring data engineers and software developers to serve the now-
liberated 'data focusers'. I'm very skeptical that these sentiments are
different than the past, or are a signal of changing times ahead.

Lastly, I'd to share the following funny snippet from the reprehensible though
satirical leveraged sellout blog:

>I turned and tapped Josh on the shoulder to get his attention. I didn’t say a
word, but my face said “Yo…yeah you, McKposer.” We locked eyes. I slowly and
dramatically reached for my mouse cable. Staring him down, I methodically
unplugged it from my computer’s USB port. The cable came out slowly but
smoothly and with it’s final, climactic release, I heard Josh gulp with fear.

>I continued to glare at him as I started to “fly around.” My eyeballs burned
through his unweathered, 60-hour-a-week-when-he-should-have-done-90 face as I
hid and unhid sheets and conditionally formatted and applied validation to
cells with triple nested conditional and indirect functions and then
culminated by on-the-fly writing a macro that took my data and made it into a
Marimekko (and we don’t even use that shit!). I never turned to look at the
screen, and my eyes never left his.

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Dowwie
This story has less to do with Excel than it does having staff capable of
using technology

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golemotron
This article could have been written 20 years ago, and it probably was in some
other form.

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api
This feels a lot like a submarine ad.

Also if this guy thinks he's going to escape silos by putting everything in
the cloud, he's quite mistaken. The cloud is just code running somewhere else.
It does not change fundamental computing paradigms.

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TheGorramBatman
This sounds like an ad.

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adekok
Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-
pap...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-
contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel)

[https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-
chart-3)

 _he authors found that Microsoft Excel would often interpret “SEPT2”, which
corresponds to the gene Septin 2, as “September 2nd”. The programme also
tended to mistake identification codes like “2310009E13” for numbers in
scientific notation—in this particular instance, the code would be read as
2.310009 times 101_

Excel is fine for the home user. But the _implicit_ conversions of input data
can play havoc with any complex analysis.

Plus, it's limited precision can cause errors such as subtractive
cancellation, etc. In order to correctly calculate complex formulae, the
calculations must be done with an understanding of the limitations of the
computers.

e.g. you don't calculate (a^2-b^2) for large 'a' and 'b'. Instead, you
calculate (a+b)*(a-b). That has the same mathematical result, but is not
affected by subtractive cancellation.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things
    

Good luck with that, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Many "non-trivial" applications got their start at someone's desk in the form
of a shitty excel spreadsheet with horrific macros. Is it optimal for "complex
analysis"? No, but it doesn't matter because most things are computationally
simple. The hard part is the intricate business logic and the timeliness of
getting results and these things are not "trivial" at all.

Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should
be providing alternatives. And no, engaging a software team/consultant for a
million dollars to develop bespoke applications or interfaces to enterprise
systems for every little project isn't a viable solution for people who need
to get stuff done pronto.

A real alternative to Excel is no small feat.

~~~
speleding
I agree with that. Modern software development has version control, unit
tests, package managers, etc. Ideally we get support for some of those
concepts in something that feels like a spreadsheet to the end user. (I'm not
sure if it could ever be retrofitted to Excel)

~~~
will4274
As others have said, you can get version control with Excel by saving the file
the SharePoint.

Some huge financial spreadsheets have sanity checks computations. With
conditional coloring (turn this cell red if the sanity check fails) these can
feel a lot like unit tests. However, these are mostly for business logic - so
it's hard to see how a vendor could provide them.

In other words, it's not that excel doesn't have version control and unit
tests - it's that the people who wrote excel spreadsheet sheets don't
understand version control or unit tests.

------
dogruck
Can anybody think of other examples of products or tools that fall into the
category of: “many people use them, even though management tells them not to,
because it helps them get stuff done.”

I’m not a mechanic, but is WD40 an example? Or maybe some tool like a hand
held circular saw, in home construction?

And, other examples from the tech world?

~~~
bbarn
Trello. In the last few jobs I've had there's almost always been a developer
who has their own personal to do list on a trello board, even if we had robust
tracking systems like jira and rally.

~~~
djhworld
Is that such a bad thing though?

Having tickets in JIRA is for the team to track and plan work that needs to be
done, not for storing personal garbage.

~~~
bbarn
No, but in smaller groups, it's been a tool to get things organized for teams,
then big ERP rollouts happen and managers start saying "stop using trello, use
this instead".

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madengr
I thought the spreadsheet revolutionized accounting in the 80’s, not
specifically Excel.

My dad brought home an IBM PC in 82, using Multiplan for chemical mixing
calculations. He thought it was the cat’s meow. Though Multiplan was the
predecessor to Excel, the spreadsheet had been out since late 70’s.

------
jstewartmobile
This is just an ad for the cloud services they mentioned. Suits whining about
not having _absolute_ control over every scrap of information is not news.

------
fiatjaf
Why does a powerful Excel alternative like
[https://calculist.io/](https://calculist.io/) (that is not a spreadsheet) and
others don't get much attention?

------
walshemj
"Tell Staffs" really I am a dyslexic and even I wouldn't make such a trivial
mistake with plural /singular.

~~~
kgwgk
The CFO of a company tells the staff of the company to stop using Excel; the
CFOs of several companies tell the staffs of those companies to stop using
Excel.

~~~
walshemj
no its not

Several CEO's (plural) tell their Staff (singular ) a CEO only has one set of
employees.

The headline implies that all the CEO's have multiple sets of staff

~~~
kgwgk
If the headline said that CFOs love their wifes, would that imply polygamy?

