Re:Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?
by Tangurena on Sunday January 11, 2009 @07:05PM
(#429856)
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do.
When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste.
When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste.
Two sample foul ups: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.as...
I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes (as well as seen one old employer's code on that site).
Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present, and who changed it when. Something like.