Re:In defense of Excel
by chadgeidel on Friday September 20, 2013 @11:19AM
(#6418243)
This is my biggest gripe. There have been several well-publicised studies where calculations were in error.
88% Of excel spreadsheets have errors - I couldn't find the actual study after a quick googling. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-err...
Recent national debt study found to contain erroneous calculations; http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-rep...
The finance industry definitely has love hate relationship with Excel. We're trying to encourage moving Excel style analysis into Python and have developed a library specifically to facilitate that, meanwhile we make sure our application platforms have first class Excel integration and export functionality.
To my mind the key point in the article is lack of facilities for code review of Excel spreadsheets. Yes there are tools to help with that, but they're not widely used. If our developers routinely pushed their development code directly to production without proper review and testing, someone (probably several people) would get fired on the spot, yet important business decisions get made based on unreviewed Excel spreadsheets all the time.
If 88% of spreadsheets have errors, what's the likelihood that the figure of 88% is correct?
Tableau is great for visualizations but if you want to do anything on your own servers it is prohibitively expensive and there are other alternatives out there. Not sure it provides the same capability as Excel for analysis.