Re:Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
by dalbasal on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @12:52PM
(#15758812)
Yes, but.
It's no good if you fix excel by making it not excel. The whole reason excel is so popular is the intuitive, unintimidating but terribly wrong way it mixes data, code and GUI. Functions in the data, constants repeated in every row, hard coded variables all over the place. If you're just supplying a GUI and hiding the code, the user can't change, add or debug anymore. The point is that they can code, even if they don't know they are coding.
The trick is to think up a way of shipping VisualStudio, but making it less terrifying to engineers, managers and such.
It's no good if you fix excel by making it not excel. The whole reason excel is so popular is the intuitive, unintimidating but terribly wrong way it mixes data, code and GUI. Functions in the data, constants repeated in every row, hard coded variables all over the place. If you're just supplying a GUI and hiding the code, the user can't change, add or debug anymore. The point is that they can code, even if they don't know they are coding.
The trick is to think up a way of shipping VisualStudio, but making it less terrifying to engineers, managers and such.