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A comment on Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands. Parent comment

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by EpicEng on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:45PM (#15819853)
Except excel is a generic solution. If you have to build a specific solution for each processes your costs skyrocket and people lose the ability to quickly implement something on their own. Everything takes forever to get done because you're constantly haggling with development and writing requirements instead of just opening excel and getting work done.
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by mulmen on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:11PM (#15820063)
I've never seen two consistently created Excel workbooks. There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. It's possible that a more formal system would have less duplicated effort. It's also possible that doesn't matter.

"Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature of software development. At the end you get software that does something that you (presumably) understand. Excel is a gold mine of undocumented terms, processes and functionality.

It's fast to build but don't pretend it gives any of the benefits of proper software development processes. The value proposition is in fact that it has none of those guarantees.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by bkor on Friday December 01, 2017 @08:30AM (#15823651)
> There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world.

There's usually more people who know Excel than people who can create systems. Meaning, the inefficiency is not that important. Some things just cannot wait or depend on a much smaller amount of people.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by mulmen on Friday December 01, 2017 @10:01PM (#15829885)
On the other hand I spent a lot of time as a data analyst explaining to business folks who "know excel" that their spreadsheets don't match because they used a different definition of week, or revenue.
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by osrec on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:48PM (#15819869)
Not really. In the long term, reg fines and dev costs balance out.
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by philipov on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:53PM (#15819918)
Citation please.
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by osrec on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:32PM (#15820238)
Pretty much every rogue trading scandal in the last few years is caused by some guy coming to the front office from the back and gaming the system with knowledge of its weaknesses. In more or less every case, poor front office controls, systems or data practices were identified as the root cause. Example https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/...
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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by EpicEng on Thursday November 30, 2017 @08:12PM (#15821177)
And Lord knows software devs never implement poorly secured and/or buggy systems.
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