People have also made megadollar blunders. As programming environments go, Excel carefully maximises the fuckup surface, enabling all users from novice to expert to stumble unawares into hidden calculation bugs. Cell-reference slip-ups (via copypaste or otherwise) are de rigeur, of course, and they're aided and abetted by Excel's cockeyed "type" system (if we can even call it that), half-baked documentation, inconsistent function library, and mediocre/absent testing, integrity, versioning, or debugging tools.
Probably the worst example I've seen first-hand was an entire retail banking loan-approval process running off of a single, shared, gigantic spreadsheet, that hundreds had tinkered with, but no-one understood or took responsibility for, and where the accompanying Word document of "things not to do" was bigger than the workbook.
Even yesterday, a friend of mine discovered they'd underclaimed expenses for a total >$1,000 due to a dodgy spreadsheet. Something as simple as pasting a list of dollar amounts from a webpage into Excel can produce an incorrect SUM() if/when trailing spaces creep in, since the resulting values may be treated as strings and evaluate to zero - and so it had transpired. Not even "text to columns" could fix it; you have to a) know about this lurking monster, b) use formatting to make it casually evident, and c) use Replace to strip the whitespace. What a crock.
In some ways the argument against Excel is like the argument against Electron: if you're comparing it to an elegant, purpose-built and well-tested application, yes... it falls woefully short.
But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.
While true, the net is a big gain when you consider the things that do work and the ease with which they do / or even the complex things that were done correctly. And, you consider if people had to hire a team of software engineers to accomplish those things then they simply would not have existed.
Indeed the team of software engineers, no matter how big and competent, is: 1) Difficult to manage because you have to convey what you want them to do, often across a gap of domain knowledge; 2) Hopelessly overbooked.
And often the easiest way to try a few things and communicate the idea is by prototyping it with a spreadsheet.
Exactly. Ad hoc work is excels true value in my opinion. And the network effect of having so many people at least casually exposed to it. Because nothing is ever done, it’s never as simple as do “this”, it’s do “this” first then let’s discuss changes to “that” then get so and so’s thoughts and revise “it” which probably has a file name ending with “Final V4” by the time the intended actually received it.
Haha, I discovered "always TRIM both leading and trailing
spaces on both lookup criteria cells and source tables" the hard way too. At 3 in the morning...All of the 20-hour days/nights I've done as a data analyst were due to Excel malfeasance.
Also - 15 digit NUMBER precision leading to truncated values that you only discover when it's too late; no Macro undo; no way I'm aware of to transform columns/rows from formulas to their values without intermediate cut/paste steps; lots of essential features (like "Copy only visible range containing hidden cells") buried in Find & Select > Go To Special menu without keyboard shortcuts; Excel's magic ability to change cell data types by merely touching a CSV (open/closing without saving changes)...
> Probably the worst example I've seen first-hand was an entire retail banking loan-approval process
There's some real doozies out there. The Reinhart-Rogoff error, which was used to justify imposing austerity on Greece [0]. The UK's COVID tracing fiasco [1]. The list goes on. People using Excel have no business making decisions that affect other people's lives.
There are. But it’s also not an exaggeration to say that entire industries run on Excel, especially the financial sector where it originated.
That’s not changing soon but it’s also worth bearing in mind that spreadsheets were the first killer apps starting way back with VisiCalc, and for good reason. Having worked with old school paper spreadsheets it’s not hard to understand why and with every update I do see these issues being addressed in really useful ways.
Probably the worst example I've seen first-hand was an entire retail banking loan-approval process running off of a single, shared, gigantic spreadsheet, that hundreds had tinkered with, but no-one understood or took responsibility for, and where the accompanying Word document of "things not to do" was bigger than the workbook.
Even yesterday, a friend of mine discovered they'd underclaimed expenses for a total >$1,000 due to a dodgy spreadsheet. Something as simple as pasting a list of dollar amounts from a webpage into Excel can produce an incorrect SUM() if/when trailing spaces creep in, since the resulting values may be treated as strings and evaluate to zero - and so it had transpired. Not even "text to columns" could fix it; you have to a) know about this lurking monster, b) use formatting to make it casually evident, and c) use Replace to strip the whitespace. What a crock.