Re:You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]
by TeMPOraL on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:12AM
(#12451412)
As a programmer I deeply appreciate the hate towards IT in companies and replacing Excel with complex internal apps. Those apps pretty much never capture the actual workflow (by virtue of requirements being provided by management instead of actual users), and even if they did, the workflow constantly changes. Excel spreadsheets may be cringeworthy sometimes, but they're used by people because you don't have to be a trained expert to make them work, and you don't have to submit requests to other departments to change something simple.
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Re:You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]
by MagnumOpus on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:50AM
(#12451567)
> As a programmer I deeply appreciate the hate towards IT in companies and replacing Excel with complex internal apps
You have to know the right point at which to make the transition. We had an Excel spreadsheet used for managing 10-digit sums of investments, held together with sticky tape, integrating SQL queries, XLL C++ addins (plural), Corba, creative use of the Excel solver and pivot tables in addition to custom data overrides (being Excel, without version control or sane error handling).
That point where operational risk exceeds the benefits of flexibility is a sign that you want to get some programmers on it - and we did, even at a cost of 10 programmer person-years or more in replacing that spreadsheet, and a horrendously slow and cumbersome process to get even trivial bugfixes or features added.