News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry. Parent comment

Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by will_pseudonym on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:28PM (#25588516)
> From an enterprise perspective, Excel is so entrenched it would be a 5-10 year effort to port existing spreadsheets to sheets. Practically speaking, most companies wouldn't see the benefit.

And at the end of the day, it would have worse performance than Excel both in calculation speed and _much_ worse UI. One of the reasons Excel is so much better than Sheets is speed. Insurance companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on actuaries. Even if Excel cost them $500/year/user, it would be easily worth it for actuarial departments.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by etothepii on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @10:11PM (#25589178)
The hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that insurance companies spend on actuaries is the real reason that no one will ever come off excel. The maths is not very complicated but the lack of source control and testing means each bugfix or added feature introduces another bug to fix next week or feature to add the week after.
[ Parent | on HN ]