Re:What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
by asdff on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @12:36AM
(#22166736)
The entire accounting department at any company exists to make sure their numbers are spot on. If your wife had an entire accounting department scrutinizing her numbers, they'd find the discrepancy. These are people who were willing to sacrifice their entire professional career and their lives during busy season at least to do nothing but tinker with excel for 40+ years; always trust a masochist verging on the insane.
Re:What’s wrong with computational notebooks?
by davedx on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:00AM
(#22167081)
> I wonder sometimes how often small companies discover they've been running in the red instead of the black, because some cell got zeroed out, a sum didn't cover an entire column
This is a really interesting insight (actually obvious when you think about it). I'm currently working on a spreadsheet app and these kinds of observations are very interesting to me. I guess things like named cells/variables will help (instead of using $A$4 etc.). Range selection could also be more intelligent (it could actively warn you if a range selection seems to be missing a few cells of the same data type). Do you have any other insights here?
We were gonna buckle down, pay the cards down hard for a while, 'color' our money so we both had discretionary spending separate from, say, the power bill. She had much more Excel experience than I did so she worked up a spreadsheet.
It was bad. We had worked up some 'fair' notion of proportionality and she basically had no spending money and mine was pretty bleak. So I redid the numbers from scratch with split that was better for her. In the new spreadsheet she has much more spending money and... hold on, I've got a bit more too? I looked at her spreadsheet repeatedly and I never did figure out where a couple hundred bucks got lost. I went back to sanity checking mine instead to make sure I wasn't wrong. It checked out.
I wonder sometimes how often small companies discover they've been running in the red instead of the black, because some cell got zeroed out, a sum didn't cover an entire column, or embezzlement is encoded straight into the spreadsheet without anyone noticing.
There's gotta be a better way.