Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best:
> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657
FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries to read and write spreadsheets (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, demo http://oss.sheetjs.com/) ended up garnering lots of demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications
It's a pithy quote, you'll get a very different reaction from a finance or small to med-sized business professional.
Excel is the ultimate maker studio that actually lives up to the promise of "build your own mini-app". I'm not saying it can't be improved on. It's just that the core model of flexibility is so compelling, pushing everyone into a SaaS app is invariably going to take away substantial power from the user.
One computer: once you decide you want to use your smartphone, for all but the most basic sheets there are problems with Excel mobile preview, even with Microsoft's official apps.
One location: Excel's lack of a universal time (showing different times in for users in different timezones) have led to gnarly workarounds. There was an attempt to correct for it in the XLSX format (cell type 'd') but it has its own problems.
One person: Excel has no inherent sync strategy. You are forced to farm out to email (and the inherent filename versioning nonsense) or use a system like SharePoint (which has its own problems you notice when dealing with people in different timezones across the world, like accidental file locking and data loss)
Any solution, SaaS or otherwise, will have flaws. It might solve Excel's weaknesses really well, but will likely lack its strengths.
Excel is still going strong in 2017 to a large degree because its strengths continue outweigh its weaknesses and that people have found reasonable ways, or add-on tools, to work around it's weaknesses.
It will be interesting to see in the coming decade if niche industry solutions or an even more incredible swiss army knife were to come around and dethrone the incumbent.
What I mean is that Excel is essentially a write-only language. It's very quick to prototype something for a semi-technical person, but auditing / code-reviewing an Excel sheet later is essentially impossible. The ubiquitous manual loop unrolling doesn't help readability either.
It also scaled fine to thousands of employees.
Having worked with a number of finance teams, the biggest problem is not when Excel is used as an analytics tool but as a financial database. Excel as a source of truth for financial data is truly terrifying. Even financial audits are still often handled with custom data pulls exchanged over Excel spreadsheets.
Shameless plug: that's why we ended up developing one of those SaaS tools (http://modfin.io). It lets finance teams map their source data to a proper, easily auditable accounting ledger so that they don't need to do their "magic" in Excel.
I am a programmer and I use csv/Excel as the single-entry financial database for a small healthcare business ($500k revenue). The accountant is fine with it. Filtering and pivot tables are a joy in Excel, and I can still run Python scripts whenever I need (mainly to auto-categorize bank transactions). Most other businesses around here use QuickBooks, which has a proper system of accounts, but then I can't play with the data.
Excel as the source of truth for a financial system is particularly scary to me b/c it's so easy for someone/anyone to change entries or miscalculate so it's very difficult for me to get confidence in its completeness and correctness.
Completely agree about analytics and scripting, but I'd utilize the CSV/Excel reports as point-in-time analytics that can be tied back a structured source of truth (or a source of truth I can hold liable, e.g. a bank or credit card statement).
Validation: I'm confident that I can catch duplicated rows and mistyped amounts because Excel formulas verify that the sum of all transactions for each account equals the account balance, and that transfers between accounts add up to $0. Do I need anything more?
Point-in-time doesn't work because I need to keep track of info that doesn't show up in the bank statements. I run a Python script that adds pretty-prints names and adds categories, and I also manually enter check details, category adjustments, business purpose of meals and flight tickets, etc.
I don't use a proper database because to do so I'd have to give up Excel's nice features (or worse, switch back and forth between Excel and the database).
I'm sure that the people who made these billion dollar mistakes were pretty confident too... https://www.cio.com/article/2438188/enterprise-software/eigh...
"The error occurred when the accountant omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billion" (Fidelity)
"There were honest mistakes made in a spreadsheet used in the implementation of a new accounting standard." (Fannie Mae, $1.36 billion loss)
There's a bunch of lower (million dollar) losses listed in the linked page too.
I think that you need to show that Excel requires more data entry, or riskier data entry, or that Excel can't catch as many errors, etc. For now I'm not convinced.
[1] https://www.accountingweb.com/aa/auditing/human-errors-the-t...
You can try to institute the same controls over Excel, either directly in code or just implicitly in terms of how it's used, but they tend to break down pretty quickly with scale.
Flip side, my feeling is that, if an analysis was worth doing, it's probably worth doing right. And to do it right, it should probably be done in a way that one can show their work. I like where the R community in particular has gone in dropping the barrier to reproducible analysis to roughly the same place as Excel.
I also wonder about google sheets capabilities. It does work so well for many people working on one spreadsheet, except for undo. The major flaw I've seen is undo, because in google sheets it was global undo, not personal undo.
Since it was a very powerful tool but struggled getting traction, they are using it as the core query tool for power BI (alongside DAX for great dashboarding).
Well done Microsoft.
With new (or prospective) clients that are SMBs, one of the first things I ask is, "so, what are you still using spreadsheets for?"
Really? I am working in company which is not handling super-sensitive data (i.e. not a Bank, for example) but I can assure you that if went around proposing to adopt a SAAS for what Excel is used internally I would not get very far.
No matter how good you are as a SAAS provider, our data stay in-house. End of story.
It's no value judgement if you want to continue using Excel for privacy, compliance, or security reasons. You do you. But SaaS companies get very good at developing privacy, compliance, and security stories, particularly as they move into enterprise. (Below enterprise it's less of a big deal, partially because customers care about them less and partially because small businesses are, as a judgement-free statement of engineering reality, abominably bad at data security.)
(off I go can often being something like: upload the result to the same or a different legacy system, again in some custom format).
Maybe I can pester my own IT dept. to add an extra option to the report so that it spouts off a .csv directly. That's all, the rest still lives in Excel.
Then I am free to play with data as much as I like (take also in account that in some cases you want these in a Excel just to be able to manipulate them better, while the old app works record by record, you can make changes across a thousand records using the Excel interface... and keep also in mind that this is maybe something you need to do once or twice a year, when you renew your catalog prices or whatever).
Now, what is the cost of:
- going out on the market looking for a SAAS that can get my data exactly in the format I use internally, applies the required transformations and send the result back in a format I can use
- assess that the SAAS vendor is indeed trustable for my desired level of security, SOX compliance, etc.
- add one more vendor to my portfolio of vendors/licenses/purchasing orders
So the reason not to go to SAAS is actually a combination of security/external resource dependency/cost/bureacracy.
Where "cost" is mostly inertia+sunk cost fallacy. I am sure that a SAAS may cost less than the hours spent manually doing all the stuff I mentioned above (including mantaining the Excel spreadsheet) but the latter is a "hidden cost" because it something that happens infrequently and is part of the normal chores of whoever is using the Excel sheet itself.
While introducing a new SAAS app will be an IT cost (to identify/approve it, add a recurring subscription etc.)
But we have to give Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston their dues because Visicalc is the original killer app spreadsheet in the literal sense: people used to say they didn't know if Visicalc sold more Apples or if Apple sold more Visicalc. It truly was the program for which people bought the platform.
Many people seem to say the same thing but the only problem I could ever see (in occasional use) was a non-standard UI which non-technical users had trouble grasping. What made it so awful?
Notes itself has some great functionality. The UI feels a little clunky - but generally you can do what you need to do.
The main problems I encounter is the way our IT department have deployed it. Many functions are not enabled or only partially working. As far as I am aware, we have no Lotus/Domino expert in our country; head office (other side of the world) has quite a few though. Any requests made through our regional helpdesk for fixes/improvements mostly go nowhere.
I like the idea of the replicated databases for email and other business functions. It should mean staff could switch to a different machine and quickly and painlessly get access to all their email and other data. However, there is a considerable amount of convoluted configuration required (the way it is currently configured) that appears to require local admin access that makes it impossible without helpdesk assistance.
I suspect many companies deployed Lotus/Domino is similar semi-functional ways that made it less useful than it could be.
The reason many companies migrated away from Lotus/Domino though was the risk of vendor lock in. My employer is stuck with a vast amount of business process captured in Lotus/Domino. They have been slowly migrating core functionality out to other web or networked database applications over the last 12 years. Even so, I don't see any move away from Lotus Notes for email for many years to come.
In the mid-90's, I thought I was helping by bringing Notes in to the company I worked at, and people seemed to agree. A ticket tracking database we set up seemed to help. Many years later, after I left, I saw a presentation where Notes was cast as the problem, with a website proposed as the solution.
Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - but it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication, built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different topic).
Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases. Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed. This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases.
In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.
Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.