Re:Look for the duct tape
by wglb on Saturday March 24, 2018 @01:03PM
(#16667564)
I actually had a gig based exactly on this. There was a very complex spreadsheet that was used by an actuarial department of an insurance company that they finally decided to automate. There were .net libraries that could access the spreadsheet components and produce external reports, and put values into a database. Oddly, they kept the spreadsheet component as a the input mechanism.
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Re:Look for the duct tape
by egypturnash on Saturday March 24, 2018 @03:11PM
(#16668288)
Oddly? Why is it odd to not want to change from an input method that you already know like the back of your hand? If everyone who’ll be using this relies on the spreadsheet program for most of their work anyway, being able to keep a lot of the process in there makes sense. Learning a new tool is friction.
It was pretty clumsy in its realization. There were like six or seven regions on the one sheet and it was hard to work with. So they kept that part of it.
To be honest, I first learned about using spreadsheets because my mother worked in insurance - not as an actuary but as one of the people under the actuarial department. Lotus 1-2-3 was the norm not only for that office but the industry. As she was retiring, Excel was becoming big (because the standard OS moved from DOS to Windows), and Excel was just starting overtake Lotus. When it's been an SOP for more than 30 years to the point that they can reliably teach the basic use of these sheets in colleges/universities? You're not highly likely to shift it in an established corp.