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A comment on Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses. Parent comment

Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by witten on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:10AM (#5257799)
It sounds like using Excel correctly is as a prototyping tool or a means of doing one-offs. If that's the case, then Excel is to a proper business intelligence system as shell scripting is to a real programming language. Each has their place.
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Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by kamjam on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:28AM (#5257911)
Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. I think it's data manipulation and reporting capabilities are excellent. In previous jobs where I used to work with a lot of data it was often easier just to output to Excel to allow the teams to manipulate and create whatever reports they needed.
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Re:Tackling the 'Excel Problem' in small businesses by joshuapayne on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:41AM (#5257989)
Indeed. As a product manager at the company authoring the post, I frequently prototype a new report in this manner.
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