Re:Linux Market Share on Desktop
by twoquestions on Thursday October 27, 2016 @10:52AM
(#12805529)
Parts of me think there's a huge market out there for people specialized in extracting business logic from Excel to an actual application, and that I would do well to get into it.
From what I've heard of other Office products, I think the hard part would be keeping my sanity.
I've done transformations of complex pricing spreadsheets to code for providing dynamic quoting on websites. It was amazing how complex the logic gets sometimes with even what seems like a simple spreadsheet.
I like the idea, but Excel is too damn good and flexible at what it is designed for. It can make many complex things simple, and to match what just one Excel professional can do, you'd have do keep an entire development department.
I know this because we tried it, and it was complete pain in the ass to continuously adapt our "Excel replacing" applications to rapidly changing business/analytics/reporting requirements.
I am curious about the long term effects of this. We still exist in a world where many people believe the most efficient way to work with numbers is through an excel (no matter the form of the numbers).
One company I worked at 3 or 4 years did payroll for about 35,000 people in an excel spreadsheet. It mail merged and spat out checks in a process that handled about 1,000 an hour. A few times Excel hung and paychecks were late. They simply didn't know or want to accept that any of the plethora of open source databases could be made to do similar but finish payroll in an ten minutes (sans printing) instead of day and half.
And then of course obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1667/