[c4mpute]

All these cool-looking dashboards are just too inflexible. You cannot add your own aggragates beyond trivialities. You cannot just "color that one value that bugs you". You cannot just generate a readable report plus some explanatory text.

Spreadsheet export + pivot table gives you all that. Doable for any moderately competent office drone without a round-trip through some endless backlog-spec-sprint-program-test-respec-sprint-... loop

[c4mpute]

To be somewhat constructive: What you rather should have done is not create more elaborate dashboards. What imho the world needs is an easy way to use a spreadsheet tool to generate and publish a dashboard. A "make web dashboard" button right next to the print button. With auto-updates when input data changes of course.

[uxp8u61q]

Have you... used Excel? It's very simple to create any kind of "dashboard" (AKA graphs on a page) and then you just share the web link to the page.

[airstrike]

Yup. That's what I want to build. Thank you for saying that -- I feel like it really validates my feelings hah

[jamesmaniscalco]

There is Smartsheet, which mostly works well for this, but its power-user features are pretty limited compared to Excel.

[Bishonen88]

That's a bit oversimplifying IMO.

There's a place for well-crafted analytics dashboards in today's business, too. They're mostly tailored to specific user requirements/use-cases and look nothing like the flashy stuff one sees on dribbble or elsewhere.

Tailored analytics dashboard can solve many pain points of Excel + Spreadsheets if done well. If ~1k people need to access the same data each day and 'analyze' it for similar things (patterns/outliers/seasonalities etc.) then a good dashboard will be quicker, better and cheaper than 1k office workers trying to create pivot tables. If that dashboard is tailored to the use case, then those 'color that one value that bugs you' can oftentimes be implemented within minutes after hearing a good use-case from a user. I say that from experience.

And from experience, I'd say that most Excel users know the basics of basics. I'd bet that 90%+

[c4mpute]

The problem here is that you usually do not have ~1k users with all the same requirements. You have 200 groups of average 5 users each, all with their own department-specific, country-specific or workflow-specific requirements. Of course a central solution will be better and cheaper. But it will never be quicker, because you will take ages to just gather requirements from all 200 distinct user groups. As soon as you have those requirements, they will have changed already, so you are working on yesteryear's problems.

And of course, given a working system, the users can drop you a quick email, explain their problem (yes, in an ideal world they could do that, and you would understand them right away...) and you implement a 5min change. In reality however, their problem will first have to be specified in a user story, with a ton of clarification requests until the story is really understood by the dev team, then you need goodwill, time and money for the implementation. And maybe their problem can only be solved by an ugly hack, a weird special case for the ternary currency and ages-old lunar-calendar-based tax-system of lampukistan. Would that really be quicker than just the lampukistan team throwing together a few formulas and be done faster than the initial email? Even when multiplied by the special requirements of the other 100 country sales teams?

Also, I've had similar change requests where is was explicitly asked to provide a spreadsheet prototype of what the statistics should look like. Well, thanks, why again do we need a dev team?

I know that spreadsheets suck. They are ugly, undebuggable hacks, always and without exception. You need tons of time to implement in hours what would be a quick one-liner SQL query. With terrible error behaviour, weird edge cases and hell knows how many hidden bugs when the locale uses the lampukistan-currency-separator instead of a decimal dot...

...Except that they provide those office drones with velocity, which, as the usual wisdom around here goes, is everything.

[hackandthink]

Agree.

And a tool like Superset enables users to customize their dashboards and charts.