Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses

Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by chollida1 on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:07AM (#5257777)

> In 2008, University of Hawai’i professor Raymond Panko published a summary of 13 field audits that checked spreadsheets used in ‘real-world’ environments. His analysis found that a whopping 88% of the spreadsheets had errors.

This isn't the entire crux of the authors reason to transition away from excel but this stat doesn't exactly seem that damning of excel.

What if the author audited custom written software used in ‘real-world’ environments, I'm pretty sure he'd find that 100% of programs have bugs in them:)

In this regard excel seems to be an improvement over custom written software.

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Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by iaskwhy on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:30AM (#5257920)

I guess he was talking about logic mistakes, not bugs as in "under certains conditions this fails". Logic mistakes are really hard to find because they don't make Excel crash.

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Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by joshuapayne on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:39AM (#5257974)

We're not producing custom written software for a single customer, rather cost-effective software product used across many many clients. So yes, as our bug queue will attest, our software is not perfect. Each report has had and will have bugs. But the number of defects each customer must find and resolve themselves is likely lower than alternative approaches.

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Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by chollida1 on Thursday February 21, 2013 @12:32PM (#5258696)

First off have an upvote for trying to sovle a difficult problem...

> Each report has had and will have bugs. But the number of defects each customer must find and resolve themselves is likely lower than alternative approaches.

Sure, the down side is that the customer loses teh flexibility of a system(excel sheet) tailored to their own needs.

What you've described isn't the difference between excel and your one size fits all software, its the difference between each client writing their own vs buying off the shelf software.

I could replace excel with Oracle DB or custom reporting website or any other piece of software and the statements would still be equally true.

"Custom software provides flexibility over general software, the downside is that bug fixes are shared across general software and not custom built software."

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