Comment by samfisher83
5 years ago
Excel is probably the single most used piece of business software in the world. People have been able to make quake. People have done 3d rendering without vba. People have done all kinds of stuff with Excel for a while now.
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.
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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.
[0] https://stanfordreview.org/clarifying-the-implications-of-th...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54422505
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.
> Excel is probably the single most used piece of business software in the world.
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment of Excel's ubiquity, I'd argue that Email is in fact the most used piece of business software.
But why? OK, I do understand why people make Quake in Excel – it's the same reason people make clock-perfect emulators for the Apollo guidance computer and use it as a pocket calculator or whatever – it's pure human curiosity. But why is Excel shoe-horned into solving business-relevant necessary problems also when it's not a good fit all?
IIRC, there are an order of magnitude more Excel "programmers" than programmers in all other languages combined. Tbh, it is a much better source of business than most professional programmers give it credit for.
To add to you list, back in the 80s, I wrote a simple x86 assembler, and a simple neural net, in Lotus 123.
And is one of the largest source of problems because of unsupportable amateur made Excel "solutions".
I strongly suspect Word is used more, probably a lot more. I wonder if PowerPoint is used a similar amount.
I'm not quite sure. Within my work team, Word is only used occasionally, specifically for anything document related. Excel, on the other hand, is used all the time from typical number crunching to keeping track of tasks (despite how much I despise using it for the latter). I also imagine that small businesses, like restaurants, don't require Word very often, but a lot of them use Excel for finances, inventory, etc.
In regards to PowerPoint, I imagine it lags pretty far behind in usage compared to both Excel and Word. Not many people are making presentations in the grand scheme of things. My intuition says that it's mostly upper management and maybe a single person in a group using PowerPoint "often".
My experiences in the business world is Word has been on a sharp decline for a long time. Excel is more likely to be used as Word. It’s very common to see a spreadsheet with no math and no tabular data but it’s print formatted.
This is spot on.
For me at least, I try to avoid Word because it is so slow and cumbersome compared to notepad or notepad++ for the purpose of writing notes. It seems like most of my word processing is for my eyes only.
I didn’t realize how much I hated Word until I started using Pages. For notes specifically I prefer some sort of Markdown editor.
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A word processor like Word is really aimed at larger, more complex documents with formatting.
Notes are usually smaller with simpler structure and formatting. With notes, it helps of the app gives you a way to organize the notes. This is really a different use case.
Powerpoint is powerful once you get deep into it. I know people who make some crazy visuals using powerpoint and you would thing it was done with some adobe software.
Not generally. Big firms it would be email 1st with browser for most line of business apps , excel close second, third PowerPoint, with Word behind by some distance and mainly for reading, rather then writing so Acrobat is high on the list as well. Most of the excel workbooks would be lists and trackers of various kinds, many just (big) tables without any formulae at all.
I would wager excel is used more, because spreadsheets are "live" and opened/updated much more than a written document.
That's true, but I posit that there are entire large categories of computer users who open Excel exactly 0 times per year but who use Word.
Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though? You can do spreadsheets in Word and Outlook, have styled text in your Excel document, add animations to your titles in Word, etc.
At this point they can just as wel get rid of the different GUIs facade and instead implement some contextual interaction model (and hopefully they'll include an API so we can generate these documents programatically and don't have to deal with this nth clippy generation :) )
> Is there a real difference between the classic MS office applications, though?
Yes, there absolutely is.
You can create a document with styled text in Excel instead of Word, just as you can edit a photo in Paint instead of Photoshop. You can do it, but the two tools have dramatically different capabilities.
It's important to think about developing for use-cases otherwise we will end up with overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people.
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Might not be from MS, but automating MS Office document generation is a solved problem:
https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://www.python-excel.org/
https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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This is what exactly what COM and OLE give you.
Nothing beats easy.