News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by Nicholas_C on Monday May 11, 2015 @08:59AM (#9524318)
>The worst I have seen was a team of several hundred people who, on $200 half-broken laptops, were running - in parallel - 500MB Excel files for hours every day, which basically did a few linear operations on about 30 variables, before joining the results in a superfile itself taking up to 20 minutes just to open on a gaming-specced desktop.

This is my nightmare. I work on a sharedrive with large Excel files that conk out Excel. We are working on building a tool to do this work but it is slow going.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by crdb on Monday May 11, 2015 @10:08AM (#9524811)
I'm sure there's automated ways of doing it within the Microsoft ecosystem... it's just not a specialty I want to acquire!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by jfjeschke on Monday May 11, 2015 @09:54AM (#9524696)
What does the tool do exactly?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by Nicholas_C on Monday May 11, 2015 @10:21AM (#9524933)
It's a custom developed planning/forecasting tool. It's a P x Q thing, but the P and Q are variable as to the type and mix of the Ps and Qs and need to be combined/sliced into many different ways for analysis/planning/forecasting. The team actually developing it has been very challenged.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by crdb on Monday May 11, 2015 @12:02PM (#9525692)
You're not really challenged until the growth rate of their Excel monster outpaces the rate at which you automate the existing stuff... thankfully Excel has a 1 million row limit, and it always takes them time to figure out how to shard an Excel database :P
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Do you feel Excel is dangerously overused? by Nicholas_C on Monday May 11, 2015 @12:47PM (#9526072)
Well in this case it's actually mine and the rest of the finance group's Excel monsters (plural) that are being automated. The devs are doing yeoman's work.
[ Parent | on HN ]