Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by turc1656 on Thursday November 30, 2017 @05:01PM (#15819991)

I disagree. I am working on something right now at my employer where we are taking spreadsheets that have been used for quite a long time (and were created fairly quickly) and they are converting all the business logic to code. Each workbook is taking weeks for them to code and test and then send back to us to sign off on.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by pointytrees on Thursday November 30, 2017 @06:26PM (#15820613)

I'm a coder DOING some of these conversions. I see both sides of the coin here. One additional point I wanted to mention is that once we have done one or two, or a dozen of these conversions, we start to see common themes.

More often than expected, there are mistakes and misunderstandings in some of the spreadsheets. There are inconsistencies in the spreadsheets. In IT we also get calls that a spreadsheet is "locked by someone." Or that someone deleted a spreadsheet.

With code, and databases, we can ensure consistency between operators. We can also leverage the data across other applications since it lives in a database now. We can pull reports for management more easily, and with more automation.

As some other comments mentioned, spreadsheets are great for prototyping, but also have their drawbacks.

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