
Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere - csixty4
https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/microsoft-excel-is-everywhere/
======
ef4
As a geek, I actually think Excel is one of the few really nice things
Microsoft has created (I realize it wasn't the first spreadsheet, but MS gets
credit for taking it mainstream).

It's one of the few general-purpose programs that really empowers ordinary
users.

Excel is essentially a functional programming environment used by hundreds of
millions of people.

~~~
tel
Excel is the non-programmer's perl, basically. Simple, gets shit done,
woefully, terribly ugly at times, but it doesn't really matter. I'd love to
see the non-programmer's Python.

~~~
csixty4
Interestingly, someone recently posted on HN that they're trying to integrate
Python into Excel: <https://datanitro.com/blog/2013/2/12/future/>

Not ideal, but it's a step up from VBA.

~~~
run4yourlives
That's not really what he was saying though.

Python was being compared to Perl, and if excel is perl, he wants to see
Python, whatever that may be.

~~~
yakiv
Perl: "There is more than one way to do it."

Some ways Excel lets you organize data: (1) chaotically on one worksheet, (2)
with different data sets in different worksheets, (3) in tables
([http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/overview-of-
exc...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/overview-of-excel-tables-
HA010048546.aspx)).

Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do
it."

Perhaps Excel/Perl*Python wouldn't have any of Excel's organization tools
exactly but would instead have only independent tables that could be made
larger and smaller as needed.

Edit after reading some comment about databases:

Perhaps this program would be a front-end of sorts for databases or could act
as one. That might be unrelated to the Perl/Python difference, but it could be
a useful feature.

------
Irregardless
The simplicity and flexibility of Excel make it great for one-offs and random
hack jobs that don't require a new application or full-fledged report. At the
same time, it has some minor idiosyncrasies that can be infuriating and make
me wary of trusting it in the hands of average end-users who need to
enter/analyze important data.

Automatic type conversion is my favorite. I can't even count the number of
times I've received Excel spreadsheets where data was completely lost because
of it. Leading zeroes at the beginning of your account number? Excel will
gladly chop those off for you. Order number looks like a date because they
used the year as a prefix? No worries, Excel will change that to a standard
date and completely forget the original format.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I don't think a business-oriented application should
favor convenience that much more than data integrity.

~~~
jackalope
This is why I'm continually amazed that Excel is used in business at all. I
use a command line program to record my hours and can report the time I've
worked on a project to the second. Unfortunately, my Excel-based timesheet
sucks at math, and shaves off time when it converts my HH:MM:SS totals to the
decimal figures (HH.x) required by payroll. It's so bad, sometimes the values
displayed in the columns don't add up to the displayed total if you enter them
in a calculator. No sweat, I only get paid for the displayed total, and at the
end of the year I compute the difference and add it to my last timesheet.

I can't imagine trusting my business finances to a program that can't deliver
a reasonable amount of precision. I wonder how many fortunes are made by
people well-placed enough to exploit Excel's weaknesses ("Hmmm, Excel shows
that we made only $10,000,000 at our bake sale. What should I do with this
leftover $700,000?" or "I can use Excel to show you that I owe you less money
than I actually do.").

~~~
mattmanser
Let's be clear, this is a type conversion issue for seconds, Excel's not going
to start adding up normal numbers strangely.

And the point of this article and the point he's trying to drive home is that
it lets non-programmers actually use their computers _for computing_.

For most businesses a home-brewed excel spreadsheet vs a $50,000 custom
program that any of us here wrote?

The harsh reality is that the Excel version written by Jane from accounting
who's the Excel whizz or even the smart college temp will probably be better
and cheaper than anything we could ever give them.

~~~
taproot
Until Jane leaves for greener pastures.

I do understand what you're saying though, there is a time, place, and trade
offs for everything related to computing.

(imho) _Most_ 'businessy' systems can and should start out as spreadsheets, it
lets the business people solve the problems with process design, and prove its
real-world value without bringing a costly developer in. The developers (like
myself) should be there to take the codified mess that results, clean it up,
improve usability, bring in more stability, and accountability. - Sadly, that
is rarely how things go.

~~~
TWAndrews
The problem is that by the time they've modified the spreadsheet app to solve
issues with process design, workflow, edge cases, it's an unholy mess that
nobody wants to touch.

------
baak
I absolutely hate Excel. It's not the number crunching that's the problem.
Database -> Excel, Excel -> Database issues are almost unavoidable. In 2
months of working with SSIS packages, I encountered every one of these
problems (I'm not the original author of this rant):

"Anyone who has worked with a database in a professional capacity for more
than 20 minutes should have a list of at least 10 reasons why Excel is a
monster. These probably include:

1\. The way it butchers postal codes that start with a leading zero, like the
town I grew up in (Granby, MA 01033 USA)

2\. Dates of any kind

3\. Serial numbers that have leading 0's (see #1)

4\. The JET database driver for Excel. One large WTF.

5\. SQL Server Integration Services Excel datasource. WTF squared.

6\. The f-ing "just put an apostrophe" workaround. WTF.

6\. a. The equally effective "format as text before you paste" workaround.
Gives the illusion of working, only to break later.

7\. Save as CSV, then reopen the CSV in Excel. Lots of magical things happen
there.

8\. While on the topic, CSV files, which are a whole WTF on their own.

9\. The Jet database driver's "type guess rows" registry entry. WTF factorial.

The root of all this: Excel makes things that look like tables, and tables are
useful for data. There is no other program that is as widespread AND makes
things that look like tables, so people use Excel to make tables of data. And
it's in fact really, really bad at that. It was designed for ad-hoc numerical
analysis and got appropriated as a database loading and reporting tool.

I think it's actually damaged the GNP of whole nations, this Excel program.
It'd be interesting to know how badly."

~~~
smackfu
Really, the main problem is that Excel (which has data types) is trying to
support CSV (which has no data types) as a pseudo-native format. If Excel
forced CSV files through the import wizard, and you could override a data type
for each column, it would solve most of the issues. Instead, each column is
implicitly treated as Auto and that fails in a lot of cases.

~~~
flatfilefan
last time I looked there was exactly such a wizard with the override
functionality

~~~
mbetter
There is, it just isn't invoked for a .csv file.

As someone who basically lives in Excel for 40 hours a week, I find my quality
of life to be much improved when I keep my text files tab delimited.

~~~
EEGuy
+0001

------
csharpminor
I really like excel, but the sad truth is that outside of the tech world, many
many people are incredibly un-tech-savy.

I used to be a contractor for a government agency (that will go unnamed).
Granted, it's the government, not the private sector but few people realize
that most computers owned by the federal government still run Windows XP.
Additionally, the approval process for getting new software usually takes 1-6
months. We're talking about installing something like Google Picasa.
Additionally, software updates would have to go through a clearance process,
leaving my computer completely vulnerable for weeks at a time while someone
(maybe) scrutinized an update to Flash.

It wasn't only the equipment – the sheer lack of ability with computers
surprised me. This wasn't an isolated incident – it seemed like everyone from
secretaries to managers with PhDs were barely above that scene from Zoolander.
Some examples:

We had one "analyst" who had never heard of pivot tables in excel. This is
someone whose job it is to analyze massive budgets. They were manually
selecting cells to see the count number at the bottom of the Excel window and
writing coordinates down on a piece of paper.

After having transferred to Google Applications for 9 months, there were still
several people who were surprised to learn that Chrome was a web browser. One
asked, "but how do you Google things?"

$1500 videochat system? Forget it, nobody knew how to use it and rarely ever
tried.

I think people are starting to wake up to the importance of technology, but I
really feel like employers should do more to test their problem solving
ability. I am by no means an expert with VB or the more advanced aspects of
excel. But my ability to research quickly and solve problems put me miles
ahead of everyone else.

~~~
hudibras
>Granted, it's the government, not the private sector but few people realize
that most computers owned by the federal government still run Windows XP.
Additionally, the approval process for getting new software usually takes 1-6
months.

We're still using IE7 in my government office. Good times...

------
cwbrandsma
<off-topic>To all the Font wonks out there who tell me about the importance of
the font to establish branding...blah,blah,blah. The font on this site, while
cool looking is very hard to read.</off-topic>

<on-topic> Something I tell junior devs when making reports, if the data can't
be exported to excel, then it isn't a report. It doesn't matter how cool your
filter/sorting capabilities are, how good you make the data look, your charts
could be beautiful to behold. If you can't export the data to excel then you
haven't done anything of value as far as the custom is concerned, because they
will ONLY look at the data if it is in Excel. In many companies, that is the
only feature that is used (the export to excel).

~~~
bcoates
That's been my experience too. It actually saves a lot of time figuring out
how to make fancy graphs and sort/filter/pivot functions--I just make nice
semantic HTML with <table>s of values. The users can point Excel at my URL and
it'll automagically turn it into a spreadsheet they already know how to use.

One thing I haven't figured out how to do is have a link on my page that
triggers an Excel HTML import operation on the current page.

~~~
encoderer
The last time I've done this I just have a link that sets the content type
header to something like text/excel (that's not it exactly i don't think,
google for it) and on Windows at least it always worked to open the page in
Excel. And if you use an HTML table, excel will just open it as a spreadsheet,
including any CSS text formatting you use.

Is that what you meant, or did I answer a different question?

~~~
jackalope
Unfortunately, Excel can't cope with some of the more modern authentication
systems being deployed on the web, so it's no longer as easy as providing a
URL that spits out an HTML table, if you have to protect sensitive data behind
a login (I think it can handle HTTP-Basic, but not anything requiring
redirects; this may have changed in recent versions).

------
JumpCrisscross
_Excel wasn’t the problem at JP Morgan. There was a reckless culture that
thumbed its nose at rules, ignored the guidance of review committees, and
tried to sweep things under the rug when they got caught. That would have
happened whether the models were written in Excel or Ruby._

If anything, Excel promotes transparency in finance by allowing more people to
read the "source" (even the bankers). Cutely named forgotten programmes
written in J were a more fecund source of problems.

~~~
doppenhe
<disclosure>I work for Microsoft, specifically I am a Program Manager on the
Windows Excel team </disclosure>

This is actually something we take very seriously and we have been building
tools to improve this. Excel 2013 actually shipped with a compliance add-in.
Here is some more info: [http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
excel/archive/2012/09/13...](http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
excel/archive/2012/09/13/introducing-spreadsheet-controls-in-office-2013.aspx)

~~~
cleverjake
Wow, thank you for that. I am honestly fascinated by this.

------
sctgrhm
Financial analyst here (and front end dev geek / enthusiast). It’s been
interesting to see a number of recent HN articles related to Excel. I work for
a Global 500 manufacturing company and can assure that Excel supports a large
number of business processes and decisions.

Raw data is often stored in proprietary OLAP data stores which are provide a
single version of the “truth”. The financial data is retrieved through the
vendor’s Excel add-ins. Analysts can then use Excel’s basic functionality to
transform and enrich the data and finally output it in a format suitable to be
presented to decision makers.

Having a decent knowledge of web technologies, I’m often frustrated not to
have a shiny web app that will automagically show the data in stunning tables
and graphs (e.g. d3.js bliss). For me, the main reason we don’t see proper
“developer made” applications in large corporations is that they do not allow
for quick and fast iteration and adaptations. Here is a very typical situation
in my job : A manager bursts into my office to ask the following : “Hey, I
know we usually compare our XYZ monthly performance to our prior year
performance and to our last forecast. Could you compare add in a comparison
between the year end run rate and forecast ? Oh, and could you also a express
XYZ as a percentage of ABC, it could be insightful. Thanks ! ... don’t work
too late.”

After a couple of Excel ninja moves : job done, manager happy, business
decisions made. If the data is wrong, I'm responsible, not the mistyped Excel
formulae.

~~~
mdda
"... I’m often frustrated not to have a shiny web app that will automagically
show the data in stunning tables and graphs (e.g. d3.js bliss). " : Are you
looking for a web interface for manipulating OLAP data? (something like
<http://www.tableausoftware.com/olap>)?

------
mprovost
I've always been a bit perplexed that there isn't a spreadsheet as good as 123
(ie, 1980s technology) as a standard part of Linux distributions. There is a
massive blind spot in the open source world around spreadsheets. As far as I
can tell it's down to the geeks writing open source tools not being interested
in solving business problems and focusing on tools for working with code and
manipulating data in text format, not cells. Which is understandable, you
write tools for free for your own needs and you get paid to write tools for
others. So businesses pay Microsoft for Excel.

~~~
apapli
OpenOffice?

~~~
mprovost
I meant like a 123 (or even Visicalc) clone that would run in a terminal. It
seems like such a basic thing that has existed on PCs for so long (in fact
even predates the IBM PC) so why did it have to wait for Staroffice/Sun to
make a GUI version? And there still is no decent text mode spreadsheet that
can run over SSH. Even a 1:1 123 clone would be perfectly functional.

------
benvanderbeek
My company's part numbers are in the form 00-0000. After enough conversations
about how to convert back to this format from the date Excel changes it to,
we've finally just decided to change our sku format. A rolling change though,
so we'll still be dealing with it till the current 5k sku's are all EOL.

I also hate the scientific notation default, in addition to the leading zero.
Guess what, UPC's exist and no one wants them in scientific notation.

~~~
mpyne
Format the cell as Text first? Enter the UPC with a leading ' to force
intepretation as Text?

If you're changing SKUs anyways you may want to change it to have a letter to
that Excel "guesses" correctly by default.

~~~
kyllo
But when someone sends you a CSV file (a very common format for database
exports and EDI), Excel does the type conversions automatically when you open
it. You don't get a chance to change the cell format to Text beforehand. The '
workaround is a huge time-waster if you are dealing with a large amount of
data, plus it screws up the file for use outside of Excel.

There really needs to be an option to turn off all type conversion globally
for all files in Excel.

~~~
srdev
Rather than open it directly in Excel, open a blank workbook and use the data
import functionality. This lets you specify the type of each column.

Its not a perfect solution, but its a passable work-around.

~~~
kyllo
This works when you have control of the data.

The real problem arises when you ask someone to send you data in CSV format.
If, in between exporting it from their database and sending it to you, they
happened to open and save it in Excel, you will get corrupted data. Usually
the sender is blissfully unaware of what Excel's automatic type conversion
does to their data.

CSV has been made unreliable as a format for data exchange between companies
(aka EDI) largely because Microsoft decided that CSV files should always be
opened in Excel by default in Windows. At the very least they should turn
automatic type conversion off for CSVs.

------
bane
In an old job I had to slice and dice lots and lots and lots of spreadsheets
and csv dumps -- almost all one offs, or in ways that were one offs.

Sure I could hack up some scripts to do that work, but almost everytime it was
quicker and easier to just use Excel as a handy-dandy swiss army knife to do
all kinds of bulk data processing.

It's a stupid good tool that gets you almost dangerously far with a modicum of
effort and no additional cost.

Doing the same work any other way would have meant keeping 3 or 4 engineers on
staff full-time banging out code and managing databases. I or another guy on
my team were able to do everything we needed in less than an hour a day, then
load the results into an appropriate analysis tool.

Quite often the appropriate analysis tool was also Excel.

------
elliotanderson
The start of the article infers that the London Whale Trade was caused by
manual handling of data between spreadsheets.

The real reason came down to a flaw in the formula they were using. From the
JP Morgan report:

    
    
        ... a decision was made to stop using the Basel II.5 model and not to rely on it 
        for purposes of reporting CIO VaR in the Firm’s first-quarter Form 10-Q. 
    
        Following that decision, further errors were discovered in the Basel II.5 model, 
        including, most significantly, an operational error in the calculation of the 
        relative changes in hazard rates and correlation estimates. 
    
        *Specifically, after subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet 
        divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended.* 
    
        This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two and 
        of lowering the VaR.... It also remains unclear when this error was 
        introduced in the calculation.
    

Source: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-
er...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-error-led-
jpmorgan-misreport-its-var-years)

~~~
jessaustin
The whole concept of VaR is an industry-wide consensus hallucination. Even if
you do it right you're doing it wrong.

But to your point, if this formula had been in a single library procedure in
version control rather than pasted and repasted into various dingy corners of
various spreadsheets, this sort of error would have been less likely. Manual
handling of formulas is at least as dangerous as manual handling of data.

------
novocaine7
I work for a mid-sized financial software company and am involved with dev on
a mature, used in production, in-house Excel clone.

Initially I figured this was about the craziest thing possible, but over time
I've come to realise the company derives genuine competitive advantage from
this system because

1\. it allows actuaries to program calculators in a language and environment
that they are comfortable with. It is a lot easier to find finance guys that
do excel than ones that can seriously program.

2\. tbh, excel is often a really good tool for the job because it allows
visualization of data as you work. If you work often with projections it kills
the alternatives like numpy, matlab etc.

The system is pretty advanced and has been used in production for about 8 or
so years. We have an interpretive runtime for use during dev and also a static
compiler that generates c++ and creates a shared library per sheet.

Some interesting points about implementing excel:

* Most functional languages do lazy evaluation on the assumption that there's a fair amount of arguments that won't be evaluated. We find that in excel all arguments are almost always used, so lazy evaluation and thunks just add overhead if you use them in all cases. We just have special cases for IF and OR et al.

* Performance is all about cell caching - i.e. memoization - but you only really have performance problems if you want to do root finding monte carlo sims online (we do). We have a dependency tracking system so cached cells are selectively flushed only when a cell they depend on changes.

* the system generates very large amounts of static c++, sometimes hundreds of thousands of lines for one sheet - this can be necessary when the sheet has millions of cells, even though we scan for similar formulas and factor them into single functions to improve spatial locality. MSVC can compile a million line .cpp in about 5 minutes using about 1gb ram - gcc 4.6 would use all the memory on my 8gb machine and swap ad infinitum (but if you split the files it is fine).

------
unsignedint
I really don't mind people sending me stuff in a spreadsheet, if it's
something that warrants such use.

Things like "I’ve had screenshots pasted into Excel and attached to an email.
Excel is an ubiquitous file format" mentioned in the article is frustrating as
well, as particularly in Japan, there's this weird practice of using it as
graphing paper, by making each cell into tiny squares, and use it as free-form
word processor alternative. (I'd say, PowerPoint would work better for this --
here's the thing, lowest tier of MS Office in Japan doesn't ship with
PowerPoint, ugh.) Some of these misuses are actually harmful -- "graphing
paper" usage of Excel causes a lot of trouble when it comes to printing, and
long-term maintaining, and there's no document structures in such use.

------
politician
Here's one thing I don't understand. Geeks love Smalltalk image-based
persistence. Geeks hate Excel documents. [1] Don't they have the same
problems? How is the program state in a Smalltalk image version-controlled? Is
that even a sensible question?

[1] generalization, do not take too seriously.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Here's one thing I don't understand. Geeks love Smalltalk image-based
> persistence. Geeks hate Excel documents. Don't they have the same problems?

They have neither the same benefits nor the same problems, though they have
some overlap in each.

Also both the "Geeks love Smalltalk" and "Geeks hate Excel" generalizations
are over-generalizations, and the set of geeks for whom the former is valid
are not the same set of geeks for whom the latter is valid (though, again,
there is some overlap.)

------
argc
I have worked in both a bioinformatics lab at University and a medical devices
company. At both places, I have seen excel used for a HUGE amount of tasks by
biologists, business people, software testers (from non-programming
backgrounds) and programmers. It was used as a tool, along with perl, php,
c/c++... depending on the level of complexity. Its just damn useful and
everyone knows how to use it.

~~~
bbgm
While we are on the subject of excel and bioinformatics

[http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-
errors-a...](http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-
excel-lessons-not-learned/)

[http://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-
excel-...](http://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel-for-
biological-data/)

I like Excel for what it is supposed to be used for, and it remains the only
MS product I use cause it does its job well. But it has limits, which are all
too frequently abused.

~~~
argc
Very interesting. I wonder what open source solutions there are that could
supplant the use of excel by non-programmers (and programmers) in such a
variety of fields. Something slightly less opinionated and slightly more
malleable.. and just as simple to use. If there isn't something, there
probably should be. I think GUI is a must if its going to overtake excel.

------
demian
Next time a lawyer, a doctor or an architect tells me his/her professional
opinion, I'm going to answer them "sorry GEEK, that's the way it is!"

------
Harkins
"Sorry?" It is wonderful. People make great things and run their businesses on
Excel. It has its faults and people are not programmers, but it makes an
incredible percentage of businesses run.

------
cloudout
Excel is still used because it has High Operating Range with a Low Barrier to
Entry. Someone can learn how to do simple tasks in 5 minutes, while advanced
users can write macros. You can build a simple calculator or a complicated
model without going through a programmers learning curve; where, you've
traditionally had to learn multiple concepts before you can print "Hello
World".

------
fencepost
Sneering at Excel is a sign of someone who doesn't understand the goals of
business and in many cases why they're employed. They aren't employed to code
nice apps in $language, that's HOW they do their job of making the business
run more smoothly.

I've built "apps" in Excel - simple stupid crap for doctors to enter hospital
charges, etc. There's no database backend, lookup is "is there already a sheet
for this patient?" Creating a new sheet is clicking the shortcut to the
template and entering the patient's name, the hospital and the month, saving
is closing and accepting the generated file name. Training was minimal,
backend is office staff, and it's lasted through 2 separate billing systems.
Development was simple form layout, locking cells, adding a few dropdown lists
to populate cells, and setting up a couple of button/autoclose vbscript
macros.

Cheap, simple, lets doctors capture charges that are worth more in one week
than I was paid for the development 5+ years ago.

------
achy
I came to HN as a distraction from the mind wrenching exercise of compiling 5
different copies of excel documents where everyone has butchered their version
in a different, horrifying way. Luckily, this is only used to keep track of
procurement data for a billion dollar engineering project... Excel is a
powerful, but too easily abused, tool.

------
fencepost
An Excel form development tip: select the entire sheet and set the column
width to 1. Merge cells that users will be entering in. Lock all non-input
cells. Hide empty areas beside/below. Yes, it looks like a printed form. Users
_understand_ printed forms.

------
draftable
I used to work for a company that used a series of excel sheets to calculate
the price of investment funds. Sure, it was a primitive technique and
sometimes a real pain in the ass, but it gave us the flexibility to make
adjustments as needed.

While I was there they were beginning to transition to a Microsoft Dynamics
based system, which turned out to be a nightmare. Maybe it was a case of bad
developers, but the guys working on this system seemed oblivious to the actual
mechanics of what they needed to build.

When you’re working with time sensitive data, making a few adjustments in
excel rather than logging requests to have some code fixed or updated can make
a lot more sense.

------
loudmax
I don't have strong feelings about people using Excel to get things done. It's
a GUI for data processing that could otherwise be done in the shell. That's
fair because I wouldn't expect normal people to learn the amount of
programming you'd need to match what you can do in Excel.

The problem I have with it is the same for any data in a proprietary format:
It needs to be exported to something else before it can be manipulated.
LibreOffice seems to do a good job of decoding .xlsx files so it's usually not
too much of an issue. When there's functionality in a spreadsheet that can't
be interpreted by an open source equivalent, then it becomes a problem.

------
kyllo
I think in the other thread about this, someone posted something to the effect
that the spreadsheet with the flawed formula was not questioned or tested
because it provided justification for the kind of reckless, short-sighted
risk-taking behavior that the decisionmakers at the bank wanted to promote
anyway. Spot-on. In organizations like this, the decisionmakers will always
massage models and abuse statistics to support the decision they already know
they want to make anyway. That's why it's important that they are forced into
a structure where testing and oversight are required.

------
clintboxe
I'm a developer at a fortune 500 company focusing on Business Intelligence. We
spent 2 years pumping out report after report, dashboard after dashboard on a
new BI web platform. The first question always asked was "How do I get it in
Excel?" Luckily after years of hearing this, IT management acquiesced and I am
now in the middle of rolling out a data virtualization platform that allows
users to connect directly with Excel to "virtual" databases that insulate them
from having to write complex SQL. Lesson? You must bow down to Excel.

~~~
doppenhe
We should talk i design the bi tools inside excel and would love to understand
your scenarios. Twitter: doppenhe

------
rednukleus
As someone who works in the financial services industry, I think that all of
the MS Office applications are great - much better than the open source
alternatives (although I wish this wasn't true).

I also want to be the lone voice here in saying that I also think that Windows
is excellent, and is much easier to use than OS X and Linux (and I've used
them all) for everything except programming. This is a very unpopular opinion
on Hacker News, but in the real world a lot of people are like me, agree with
me, and it is worth bearing this in mind.

~~~
jessaustin
_in the financial services industry... in the real world_

You're not trying to tell us there's some overlap between these two places are
you?

------
deltasquared
I wonder if by geeks, the OP means "people who want to get the correct answer
consistently."

------
colkassad
>VisiCalc inspired Lotus 123, a similar program for IBM PCs. Bosses were much
more willing to order a PC for their staff than something built by California
hippies. As they used to say, you’ll never get fired for buying IBM.

Is this really true? I don't remember this being a widely held viewpoint but
then again I was 10 years old. Back then, normal people didn't know who Steve
Jobs was, never mind his damn-hippy ways.

~~~
brcrth
My impression is that Apple II/VisiCalc were used by small/personal business
and Lotus 123 was for big corporations/industry. But I might be wrong since I
wasn't even born on that period.

------
giardini
Given that perhaps 90% of Excel spreadsheets have errors I fail to see that
Excel is a good or useful tool. Nicholas Taleb warns against the use of
constructs (e.g., value at risk) that give false confidence to the user. Excel
unfortunately appears to be such a tool. I believe most Excel users would deny
that _their_ spreadsheets have significant errors notwithstanding strong
evidence to the contrary.

~~~
mbetter
Your comment is just darling. "Given that perhaps 90% of Excel spreadsheets
have errors ..." -- a completely made up statistic leads to -- "I fail to see
that Excel is a good or useful tool." -- a conclusion that doesn't even follow
from your made up evidence, even if it were true.

Nicholas Taleb would be rolling over in his grave, if he was dead.

~~~
giardini
"darling"? "made up evidence"? Are you employed by Microsoft?

Others may have provided this URL: "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors" by
Raymond R. Panko <http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow.htm>

The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group: <http://www.eusprig.org/>

Grammar correction: "if he was dead." <\--- _were_ dead, _were_ dead!

Luckily he's very much alive. From Nicholas Taleb's website at
<http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html>

"My refutation of the VAR does not mean that I am against quantitative risk
management - having spent all of my adult life as a quantitative trader, I
learned the hard way the fails of such methods. I am simply against the
application of unseasonned quantitative methods."

Use of a paradigm that has such a high error rate is, at the very least, an
"unseasoned quantitative method".

~~~
mbetter
"These error rates, although troubling, are in line with those in programming
and other human cognitive domains."

I take it you are against software in general, then.

------
smortaz
If you like (or must use :)) Excel and like Python, we built a little two way,
live bridge between Visual Studio & Excel. Free/OSS. Short video here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk&hd=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk&hd=1)
; download at <http://pytools.codeplex.com>

------
bfwi
A year ago I graduated and started working in the corporate world. Damn
Windows and MS Office all around. I realize now, that at university I was
living in a bubble of nice, free software. And if you had a problem you
programmed your way out of it. Now I use Excel all the time.

Good thing I have side projects.

~~~
shmerl
It really depends on the corporate world. Some uses free software as well.

~~~
cema
I think the point of the parent comment was not about software being free but
by being able, quote, "to program[...] your way out of it". Which I think is
an important argument for or against Excel (or many other programs) depending
on whether we talk about programming users or non-programming users.

~~~
shmerl
Right. But probably I was just lucky enough never to encounter such kind of
corporate world which uses Excel (or any other spread sheet software for that
matter) in such weird fashion.

------
keypusher
I don't think many programmers think Excel is a bad tool. Excel is a great
tool for what it does. But, Excel is not a database. And when an Excel
spreadsheet actually becomes your business's application, that's when you have
problems (in my opinion).

------
EEGuy
Doubtless there are more sophisticated ways to do this, but for a quick one-
off, _manual_ validation test on tabular data presented by a web page, I
scrape it (highlight it) off the web page, hit ^C, paste to a text editor, do
some reformatting, then paste to an empty sheet.

Then I do my checksums of the page's presentation in the sheet. Find a bug, go
to the SQL in the back end, fix the cause, write a little (manually run) SQL
validation test test for that case, then cycle through it all again until the
bugs are out and a nice little suite of validation tests in SQL. Really nice
to have Excel, where I can point-and-click to write sums.

------
cadr
For an overview of some of the issues with current usage of spreadsheets in
business - <http://www.eusprig.org/basic-research.htm>

They have a conference just about spreadsheet risk.

~~~
Spooky23
That is not spreadsheet risk, it's business process risk. You address risk by
applying controls.

My old boss was a former labor statistician. His job 40 years ago was
basically producing reports by having sets of data tabulated (aka "sending a
job to a pool of people with big mechanical calculators") analyzing the data,
and sending it somewhere else to be compiled into some report that was shipped
to various places. They had people randomly sampling calculations for key or
other errors. Other people were sampling the quality of his analysis and yet
others were proofreading and double-checking the material prepared for print
for typographical errors. The problem there was that building that process
required thousands of people and a very rigid procedural setup to ensure
consistency.

Computers changed all of that, and ultimately, all of that checking and re-
checking was replaced by Excel. But that doesn't mean that you don't but a
process around financial activities. You still need checks and balances.

All of these banks made decisions that speed to market for trading was worth
the "risk" -- in this case that incompetent or malevolent traders can
potentially put the bank out of business. The management accepts this risk
because they don't bear ANY downside risk, as the bank is ineffectively
regulated corporation. In the days when investment houses were partnerships,
there were much tighter controls, as failure of the firm would bankrupt the
partners.

Blaming Excel for this is absurd.

------
touristtam
Excel has been used and abused past it usefulness in the 'Big (Monkey)
Business';

Any tailored software has to go through the constant scrutiny of IT managers
and bean counters that don't understand anything and are over impatient while
a donkey can 'code' a couple of function in Excel. Excel DOES NOT take into
account user abuse and collaboration between them, and I don't blame it. But
this is a networked world and not anymore a collection of work station where
data is better passed from one user to another one via the mean of a floppy
disk.....

The use of tools is reflecting the cerebral activity level of its user base.

------
EEGuy
Untouchable algorithmic integrity? History tracking? Data not easily
corruptible by users? Accuracy in decimal amounts past 12 to 14 significant
digits, particularly if fractionals involved? Huge data volumes? Mind-numbing
repetitive tasks?

Excel for that? No. Code for that? Yes.

Agility? Quick checksums? Looking for errors? Ad-hoc analysis?

Excel for that? Yes! Code for that? Depends on whether I have to do it again,
or if it gets big.

Ad-hoc correlations for equality checking? I'll take a FULL OUTER JOIN over
criss-crossing cranky VLOOKUP(...)s any day.

------
Raydric
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi0qUZCz6F0>

------
jessaustin
I find I'm using Google Sheets for everything I used to use Excel for. It's
easier to script, much easier to share, and if necessary it will export to
Excel. I haven't run into anything I need that it won't do.

Of course it wouldn't be ideal for a business with a lot of legacy stuff in
Excel.

------
njharman
RANT you don't need to read, but I have to write.

I recently have the "opportunity" to use Windows and MS office products after
10year or more absence. And Holy Fuck does MS suck at making usable software
products. Almost every single UI/UX choice they made is wrong. They ask for
confirmation when it's uneeded, they blithely fuck shit up without
confirmation when should ask. 4 bazillion tab bars filled with crap. Simple
things are hard to find or do, every suggestion / guess is wrong. Things they
should guess (such as ',' is the delmeter when importing a file ending with
.csv and filled with csv data) they don't. On and on.

Really the most frustrating experience since trying to buy a Nexus 4.

The only reason most people don't suffer this is they've been slowly
acclimated to this crap over many years of Office's evolution to below the
bottom.

The other MS product I use regularly, xbox and mobile glass or whatever it's
called, both also have fucking horrible UI. But half of that is them wanting
to force thinly veiled ads and up sells at you.

------
jumby
Two words: pivot tables

------
Beltiras
My beef is: Why Excel?

It's not like you can't script Libreoffice spreadsheets, or OpenOffice, or for
that matter Docs Calc sheets.

Why does it need to eat a big part of our budget?

------
akashshah
There are some non-programmers in my team who use excel to generate bash
scripts because they find the bash for-loop syntax too hard

------
zurn
I use Python for one-off data munging and don't know spreadsheets. Can someone
shed some light on what I'm missing?

------
importednoob
Excel: Microsoft's greatest achievement.

------
Gravityloss
Confuses Excel with csv.

------
mtgx
As Android and iOS go to become the #1 and #2 platforms in the future, I don't
see Office remaining that relevant in the future, even if they port it to
those platforms.

~~~
Spooky23
What is the replacement for Excel on iOS?

Applying the "death of the PC" mantra to all things gets old. Things like
multi-tasking, having access to a filesystem, embedding different types of
documents is a "feature" that is really useful to people doing actual work.

One of my duties a couple of years ago was doing budgeting and rate-setting
for a $50M IT business. A rich spreadsheet like Excel was an essential part of
the that process, and there is no replacement platform out there that is going
to replace that category of app. (You may be able substitute LibreOffice or
something.)

------
joedev
What's to be "Sorry" about? I don't get it.

------
martinced
Sorry, David Michael Ross (apparently you love your name enough to show it
using big fonts on your site so I put in in full here),
{iOS,Android,Linux,Java,OracleDB,...} is Everywhere.

What is TFA's point by using such a linkbait title? My home router (a "gift"
from my ISP in exchange of a subscription) is running Linux. My Internet TV
decoder is running Linux + Java. My phone runs iOS and my girlfriend's phone
runs iOS. We have two Mac computers here (and a Linux one but that isn't
common).

You can hardly make an electronic money payment without having Java involved
in the process at some point (including to generate COBOL on the fly!).

Hundreds of millions of people (really ?) are using spreadsheets? So what:
there are hundreds of millions of people carrying Java smartcard in their
pockets daily. There are hundreds of millions of people using cellphones.
There are billions of people using a browser daily.

What is the point about spreadsheet? We get it: people need to fill taxes,
compute "stuff", etc.

We also understand that the corporate world (representing less than 50% of a
country's GDP but being very "big-mouthed") uses Excel.

Just like the corporate world is totally and utterly dominated by solutions
like SAP and its army of consultant writing ABAP and Java code to interface
with SAP.

Is Microsoft is still dictating the rules of the entire IT game because Excel
is a spreadsheet software?

Is that why such linkbaits are posted? Because we like to know that it's
possible that companies like Apple and Google (two places where you're
probably not seeing a lot of "Excel" compared to the other stuff you'll see
the people there working with) can come tomorrow and change the world?

But, no, we should all be in admiration because spreadsheets are used in the
"real corporate world" (and because of course we should bow in front of the
corporate world, because the only business is in corporate right!?) and
because Excel has a huge market share amongst the various spreadsheets
software (I do certainly see Google Docs making inroads that said).

Seriously: what's the point!?

What's next!?: "Sorry, nerds, Microsoft Word is everywhere"

Or "Sorry, hackers, Internet Explorer is everywhere"

Or "Sorry, crackes, Microsoft Windows is still present on hundreds of millions
of PCs".

Really? What is the point?

That we should have give up programming because every single programming need
out there can be filled by a corporate user knowing how to enter an IF/ELSE in
a spreadsheet!?

I'm seriously confused by these articles and the fact that people do still
upvote the blatant linkbait.

