Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors

Re:Excel warriors who save governments and companies from sp... by fauigerzigerk on Saturday October 17, 2020 @05:17AM (#24808710)

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts.

One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Excel warriors who save governments and companies from sp... by Aeolun on Saturday October 17, 2020 @05:42AM (#24808811)

I think the question is what a viable alternative is if the company does not want to spend any more effort than the effort of the singular employee that wants the report.

They can do it by themselves with Excel. Can they do that with any other software?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Excel warriors who save governments and companies from sp... by fauigerzigerk on Saturday October 17, 2020 @06:17AM (#24808959)

Yes, some can, but depends on the task.

Not many people would be able to do complex calculations in an RDBMS, especially if it requires joins or grouping. But many more are able to use a GUI tool to create a single database table and import some CSV data.

The recent UK disaster wouldn't have happened if the data had been imported into Access or SQLite instead of an Excel sheet.

Of course it's not a panacea. Badly designed databases can be just as error prone as Excel, but they have different error modes.

[ Parent | on HN ]