WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 45436205

(no title)

salviati | 5 months ago

Reminds me of "Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel sheets?" [0]

You need experience to see the shorcomings of spreadsheets. No version control. No tests. In general it's good for things that don't need to evolve, but stay the same (most likely because they're short lived).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611431

[EDIT] An example of a comment from that thread pointing in this direction:

> In general, you adapt to the excel owner's quirks, not vice versa. If you don't like it you should create an excel sheet of your own and copy/paste, which people also do.

> I knew a project manager who's job seemed to be reconciling multiple versions of a spreadsheet with different authors.

discuss

order

tclancy|5 months ago

Well yes, starting as a coder in the 2000s in the US, I always thought of my job as turning tortured spreadsheets sitting on a Windows network drive that have to be constantly babied by an underappreciated office staffer into web apps. But I do recognize that a lot of businesses have been run on spreadsheets and run well. There’s a scaling problem and when it hits, ideally you know and can move to an app, but perfect is the enemy of done.

jeroenhd|5 months ago

> No version control

You can use version control with Excel spreadsheets, though it's not very good. It's called "track changes" and even has a limited capacity to approve/reject changes from other people.

Very few people uses that feature, especially not the people who have built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes, but you could do it if you wanted to.

Chilko|5 months ago

That's not the only version control through - if you use Excel connected to Onedrive or Sharepoint (like most major orgs in my country), then you have version history built-in tracking every edit going back months.

bluGill|5 months ago

The people who have "built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes" should have used a database not a spreadsheet. Though they likely don't have enough training in database design and so if they had their result would be worse - but that is the fault of their lack of training. To be fair, database training is not something they should have in their position

asdff|5 months ago

You can also just put the spreadsheet into a git repo. Done. Version control.

PanoptesYC|5 months ago

I've mostly seen the problem manifest when information is spread across a multitude of spreadsheets all stored in different places. The people involved don't know which spreadsheets contain what information and which are supposed to. Sometimes they end up having conflicting data purely because they don't realise that someone else thinks the primary source is spreadsheet A while they're only making changes to spreadsheet B.

Any flaws with Excel haven't been due to the actual program or data, but just how the files are managed within projects. Labyrinthian sharepoints, files being forgotten about on network storage, etc.