Nah there's no way they have that many in Finance, but they do have that many when you include 2-3 degrees of separation.
Finance hands some calculation spreadsheet to someone else, who then rolls it up to a department head who then tells another analyst to modify what the previous guy did because head didn't like it and so and and so forth.
The people most likely to never have to work with excel are IC engineers. If you're a manager, you likely have to do budgeting which goes to HR which goes to ... you guessed it - finance.
And you have to remember you're in a business org. If you need to read an excel file once a year, you'll want a license because you're part of Amazon - I mean my god I have to go find a separate computer with an Office license?! No way, just give me a license.
All of Amazon has ~1.5M employees. That includes everyone picking orders, and doing any kind of logistics and delivery. I really don't think they have about 1M employees who regularly exchange financial spreadsheets.
Office isn’t just for spreadsheets. Office is the whole shebang, including Outlook, Active Directory, Teams, etc.
If your company uses Office, then your employees typically have their employee accounts managed through Active Directory. Which means that every single employee gets their own licensed Office seat, even if they don’t touch anything in the Office beyond email and Teams.
A: you don't nee a licensed office seat to be a user in AD
B: For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD
C: The comment above said there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets, which is what I responded to.
> For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD
Do you agree that every employee needs work email access and some sort of a user account (for managing their benefits, interacting with payroll systems, etc.)?
If yes, then sure, it can be technically accomplished without AD. However, AD is an extremely well-suited system for managing incredibly large swaths of work accounts. And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works. On Amazon scale, it would be a ton of money spent with very questionable results. Things aren’t that simple, and AD is an extremely powerful tool that can handle quite a lot of really quirky and intense scenarios.
> there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets
Finance employees are far from the only ones needing tools like spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc. What do you think devs use for writing and sharing design docs? What about presentations (which are used by pretty much everyone working in the corporate)? What about email? Do you think warehousing doesn’t use those at all?
Office is just straight up a good overall deal. You pay for a seat and you get all the Office tools (word/excel/etc), Teams, AD, Outlook, Onedrive/Sharepoint, etc. If your user touches even one of those, it makes sense to just say screw it and get a license seat for everyone, even from just the overhead costs perspective.
I am not saying that MS Office is the end-all. My current place uses Google offerings instead, but the general idea is the same.
I can't reply to @filoleg's response, but here we go:
> And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works.
I've seen a large bank with THREE user account management systems in parallel, and two email systems. And they weren't alone in this way of setting things up.
* IBM RACF, for stuff that touched the mainframe
* MS AD for corporate employees and branch managers, they got Exchange email and Office
* OpenLDAP and some opensource email system for everybody else
excel isn't just used by finance. I can use any number of command line tools, scripting languages, jupyter notebooks, etc, but sometimes is just faster to throw it in excel, do a little futzing around and send it over to the non-technical folks in a tool they know how to use.
