$10B Annual Tab for Spreadsheet Errors? 305
theodp writes "According to PWC and KPMG, more than 90% of corporate spreadsheets have material errors in them. With each error costing between $10K and 100K per month, one expert estimates corporate America loses in excess of $10B annually through the misuse and abuse of spreadsheets." From the article: "The key point about spreadsheets is that you need to know which ones are critical to your business, which ones are merely important and which ones you do not have to bother too much about. Once you know that, you can start to apply appropriate policies depending on the criticality of the spreadsheet involved."
Does anyone understand this? (Score:2, Interesting)
What are businesses overpaying bills? Or keeping projects up that are not needed cause of this?
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd bet a LOT of money that fewer mistakes are made with spreadsheets than by people who think they can do perfect math in their head, or perfect long division or multiplication on paper.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, it's not bad math it's wrong use of math. It's more the case of using wrong models to solve problems.
>fewer mistakes are made with spreadsheets
That should read, more mistakes are made faster with spreadsheets. Take a simple example like a spreadsheet to calculate the cost of some project. Lots of places they use a template, filling in some values and the spreadsheet does the rest. Small mistakes in the template can become seriously expensive when all is accumulated.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:2)
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Funny)
As long as we make mistakes, in OUR BENEFIT, we're ok, right?
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I fixed the problem in the spreadsheet, and then dug through all the existing orders that were about to be filled and corrected them. The problem had cost GE about $300,000 and was about to cost them another $120,000 in the next month. The interesting thing, is nobody had really cared to do anything about it until an intern came along, and dumped it on me. They just don't see $10,000 as a whole lot of money in the grand scheme of things, so I'm sure stuff goes on like this all the time.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem with spreadsheets is that they are increasingly being used to implement software, but that the architecture they provide (a matrix of expressions) makes it almost impossible to validate the code.
If the CFO of $COMPANY produces a spreadsheet demonstrating that all is well with the company finances then it is difficult to prove him wrong.
This may be what went wrong with companies like Worldcom. They could have had one spreadsheet for insiders and another for auditors.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem with spreadsheets is that they are increasingly being used to implement software, but that the architecture they provide (a matrix of expressions) makes it almost impossible to validate the code.
Looks like they could have found a new line of business: give professional advice how to solve the problems generated by their professional advice, whoops... this is the old consulting business model!
Andrea
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most spreadsheets are made by the people on the ground-- secretaries, low-level managers, clerks. That's most of the problem right there; these folks tend to poke around randomly at a problem until they get something that "looks okay," and then forget how they got to a solution and just use it. God forbid that anything should change.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand it, it's a slow news day can mean time to post things from the totally unsubstantiated category that's always chock-full of stories thanks to the the only way I'll beat the deadline is to make something up effect.
It's simply bad journalism. The author names PWC as a source of the 'over 90%' figure, but PWC in turn was citing some professor from Hawaii who had looked at 54 spreadsheets and found errors on 49 of them. 54 is a sample so small as to be absolutely meaningless and everyone responsible for the story finding it's way here should hang their heads in shame.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have spent the last two and a half years auditing spreadsheets for (1) complex financial transactions and (2) models for large public infrastructure projects. I work with a dozen other rocket scientists and actuarial types who specialise in this. My experience is consistent with "some professor from Hawaii", namely Ray Panko [hawaii.edu] who is the world expert in the field. Almost every worksheet of every model I have audited, has been riddled with potential and actual errors- and these spreadsheets are written by professionals and have been already reviewed internally. Auditors like KPMG and PWC are interested in whether an error is "material", i.e. big enough to effect the client's ultimate decision on whether to proceed at a given price. The sample size of 54 is large enough to give overwhelming evidence of the large number of errors, and of the proportion of such errors which are "material".
All software has bugs when you write it. Reviewing your code, peer review, formal testing, code reviews help you reduce that. Even with this, how much released software is genuinely free of errors? I think perhaps TeX is. With spreadsheets, it is hard to write clearly and simply, it is hard to review, it is hard to test and you have no comments. There are going to be mistakes, and lots of them. If you are not seeing them, it is only because you are not looking. To make a spreadsheet (or any software) without errors you need to approach the problem like NASA. This, of course, requires a budget like NASA or a horde of open source zealots, and so PHBs and accountants need to decide when the cost of detection balances the risk of error.
john@xq.se
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rule2 - refer to rule 1
There is nothing wrong with speadsheets and they are very usefull for analysis but what happens is people try to use them for everything and eventually you have a spreadsheet that is used as a company database.
Yes I am aware you can lock a spreadsheet but how long before someone (usually a manager) makes a "special" change and before long all sorts of "special" changes occur and things start to get rapidly out of synch.
A simple analogy is how may people have ever seen simple Unix groups work really well, now take that one step further to ACL's and it starts to get interesting. This is particularly true when you have many people wanting to make changes. The poor Sys Admin can only duck and run for cover.
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:3, Interesting)
But how do you check these things? In a business which might be shifting millions of cases of product a day, how do you flag up a couple of thousand, which for any other order, might be quite a reasonable number. And well, the gr
Re:Does anyone understand this? (Score:2)
Oh wait (Score:5, Funny)
Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of this, when you are finished with a tube of toothpaste, there is still a little you can't squeeze out. I'm sure someone could add all that up and claim Americans are throwing out $100 million a year on toothpaste. You could say the same about a lot of products. But what's the point? If you can't do anything about it, why worry yourself over it?
So in this case, you can't eliminate all accounting mistakes and typos, but if some PHB needed to read this to question his spreadsheets, he's useless.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Funny)
sPh
I have a cheap solution (Score:2)
Ohh but if they sell in bulk they reduce profits because people shop less and are locked in.
Id rather buy one toothpaste container lasting 6months thanks.
Either a big ass 20oz tube, or a push soap style dispensor.
Re:I have a cheap solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Ohh but if they sell in bulk they reduce profits because people shop less and are locked in.
Knowing them, they'd charge more per unit and count on the customer not to check, Sad thing is, they'd mostly get away with it.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Funny)
And I guarantee that getting KPMG to make errors for you is going to cost you more than $10 grand.
It's worse than that... (Score:3, Insightful)
So how much money is the Fortune 500 wasting annually? It is a simple sum: $165,000 times 9 times 500. That amounts to just shy of three quarters of a billion dollars. And is that anywhere near realistic? No. It is probably safe to say that corporate America, for example, loses in excess of $10bn annually through the mi
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd put it another way: Loss compared to what? If a spreadsheet saves a company $100K/month, but an error in the spreadsheet costs $10K/month, then the spreadsheet is still doing the company $90K net on the profit side of the ledger.
Yes, it'd always be nice to kill that $10K bug, but until you do, you can still write it off as a cost of doing business.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
I work at a large bank, making software to support the investment strategists. Often we find such situations where some strategist has built his own "program" using spreadsheets and sometimes some access "database". And in 99
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
I love the implicit sneer in your scare quotes around "program" and "database".
It's not surprising that investment strategists want to play around with their own models and investigate data on their own. It's part of what they are paid to-do.
It seems to me that one way forward here would be to provide them with the Excel export that they want, but before it is enabled, the strategist has to a
this is a news article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:this is a news article? (Score:2)
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets used in business have been proven to cost a lot of money due to mistakes.
GIGO (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because this deals with spreadsheets makes it news? I think people have had this problem since people started making inventories.
Re:GIGO (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GIGO (Score:2)
at my work we use linux, but the retarded admin staff need to use windows and office for their crap.
need to email people a list of something? they reach for Word. want a 2-column list? Excel!
ffs. openoffice or my mac can deal with them fine, but it's the same sort of retardedness as HTML-emails. it's like proof that god exists and he doesn't want us to be happy using computers.
Re:GIGO (Score:2)
Re:GIGO (Score:2)
The owner of the company had a complex set of spreadsheets that helped him evaluate his employees efficency. Turns out it was vastly underestimating EVERYTHING and making his employees look like dipshits because a bug basically doubled their time off each week (it was added twice). Nobody noticed -- in *TWO YEARS* of using the spreadsheet.
Other Losses? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Other Losses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Other Losses? (Score:3, Informative)
And if it goes about error margins: I once was programming for a large real estate bank, and we had to do a report for interest coverage calculation (that is: proving that you didn't lend more money to your customers
Primary error (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Primary error (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, if you're doing it by hand, how would that stop that error from propogating on down. I remember when I used to do tons of basic math by hand, little errors would still propagate through. At least with a spreadsheet, you can program in some error-checking logic.
With a spreadsheet it's a lot easier to get the same answer multiple times rather than doing it by hand each time.
There's nothing inherently evil with electronic spreadsheets. We had been using paper ones forever before then, and they had the same (and in many cases, worse) problems.
Re:Primary error (Score:2)
That type of logic applies to any data error rippling through any data system... not only spreadsheets. The problem in my opinion isn't the fallibility of spreadsheets, it's the misconception that anyone can "handle" them.
Re:Primary error (Score:2)
Re:Primary error (Score:2)
Obligatory Charles Babbage (Score:2)
On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Why shouldn't a spreadsheet cause the exact same problems as entering the wrong number into a ledger? What is it about having a computer involved that somehow makes entering a wrong number more insidious?
Bad data propogates throughout any set of
Re:Primary error (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that would be that case no matter how the calculation was done, wouldn't it? I think the issue is more that spreadsheets tend to be impossible to test or debug adequately. It's like spaghetti code without comments. Of course in a simple case, each column has a clear name, and the calculation flows nicely from left to right, and everybody understands what it's doing. But that's like saying that in a simple case, FORTAN programs flow from top to bottom, and everybody understands what they're doing.
I know at least one not-pointy-haired boss (my mom) who has had major problems with spreadsheets created by employees that are flaky, poorly documented, or poorly understood.
The good news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer. The bad news is that spreadsheets let people who aren't programmers do all kinds of fancy calculations on a computer.
1 small problem with spreadsheets (Score:5, Insightful)
This was definitely a problem at my old job. They wanted to create a payroll sheet to keep track of hours, and the easiest way to do it was via a spreadsheet. I was the most programming-savvy person there (heh, you can already smell their doom), at so, not having any database training, I created a really suped-up spreadsheet that handled it for them. It was GREAT, until we had a work situation in which some people worked past 12:00 at night. At that point, people's total shift hours came out negative. We got it fixed eventually, but it involved some really nasty calculation, and it was a problem that could have much more easily fixed if it'd been done by database from the start.
Yes! Misuse of spreadsheets costs big money! (Score:2)
Most recently, we got to spend over a month repeating work because it had been fscked up in a spreadsheet. The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that the same flexibility that lets you drag numbers around anywhere you want, also lets you drag numbers into to wrong places with little or no warning.
Normalisation
Re:1 small problem with spreadsheets (Score:2, Interesting)
Adopt a spreadsheet today, for the children. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is that just a wee bit breathless, from an analytical point of view? I doubt that even "misuse" really even has the right connotation, here. More like, misuse of math.
Re:Adopt a spreadsheet today, for the children. (Score:3, Interesting)
We're loading tens of thousands of items into an ERP from spreadsheets put together by users. Many items have leading zeroes which are to be preserved, and spaces which are not. For example, part number 0032330 189 5 should be loaded into the ERP as 00323301895. When using Excel's Find/Replace function (replacing " " with ""), the
Re:!@#$@% leading zeroes (Score:2)
The first hurdle is that you have to open the file the correct way (using File...Open) in order to have it even give you the option to open the file in a sane and controlled manner. But after you've cleared that hurdle, you need to remember to select every column in the spreadsheet and tell Excel to read it as "text" in order
And this money goes where? (Score:4, Insightful)
If only there were some consulting company, someone who I could call to help me implement some best practicies, to help me avoid these tragic errors. Do PWC and KPMG know anyone who can help?
Re:And this money goes where? (Score:2)
Re:And this money goes where? (Score:4, Insightful)
Take your point about PwC and KPMG though.
yoy (Score:3, Interesting)
I never ceased to be amazed at "projects" handed to me from which the management of the assets, funding, etc. were all contained in a spreadsheet, typically in that person's "Documents and Settings" directory somewhere (the "My [insert the item du jour here]" sometimes, sometimes not.
And the spreadsheet often as not was written by someone not familiar with how spreadsheets worked, and were not of programming ilk.
Once (and I'm NOT making this up) I watched as one of the afore-referenced changed a value in a cell, added the values of a small range and entered that number in a "totals" cell. Said person was very surprised when shown the "sum" function.
And this was an incident in a very large corporation... with lots o' money at stake. I was never very popular for taking my stance, but I would always refuse to allow any spreadsheets be a part of my projects for managing info.... (and don't EVEN get me started about using spreadsheets for documentation... )
Re:yoy (Score:2)
How'sabout calculating the cost (Score:2)
We address the cost of every little thing in this culture. How much do adverts bring? How much does this job bring in? How much will it cost to clean this chemical spill up? How much does it cost to treat our employees better?
There's a bigger question these businesses could ask: How much would we save if we just shut our doors now?
During the Microsoft DoJ lawsuits, I wondered why MS just didnt close up shop, rescend all the EULA-licenses and just quit. Why would
Re:How'sabout calculating the cost (Score:2)
"
1) because the cost of closing shop is very expensive, and cuts into profits.
2) this move doesnt benefeit the shareholders.
2) being the most important, since they control the company.
Re:How'sabout calculating the cost (Score:2)
for example...
"The law is now harassing us and many of them want for our splitting and destruction. The best solution we forsee is that we literally lay everybody off, seel everything to reimburse our stockholders, and file bankurptcy proceedings. If we continue on this course we're on now, we possibly we split, and perhaps lose everything cause of judgements aginst us"
It really comes down to a vote and what the 'stockholders could forsee to
Re:How'sabout calculating the cost (Score:2)
Attn: Companies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Attn: Companies (Score:2)
Defects in software, use, or both? (Score:2)
What tools can they use? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's when the spreadsheet becomes useful that people realize it's not scalable (maybe they don't use that word, but I do) and can be tough to maintain.
Not to single out IT departments in particular, but I think the reason that these spreadsheets start up and grow is specifically that it's often difficult to get someone in another department to understand your needs well enough to make the tool that you really need.
Today managers can't fund a good solution because their budget doesn't allow for the necessary development. Tomorrow they won't be able to afford to get the support they need to get a spreadsheet done.
I don't have a great solution outside of better training for people on how to make spreadsheets that serve their needs.
Re:What tools can they use? (Score:2)
Well, that should be easy enough to fix. Lemme just add a coupla zeroes to this cell here, rerun this macro, and voila. The money's now in the budget... : p
Re:What tools can they use? (Score:3, Insightful)
'Spreadsheet sprawl' is the problem and OLAP [google.com] (online analytical processing [wikipedia.org]) is the answer.
Of course the whole 'best tool' addage applies, but the problem with that is that most people don't realize what sort of tools there are out there for centralizing information (ala data warehousing [wikipedia.org] - wikipedia or google directory version [google.com]).
A bonus to these tools is that of the three that I deal with; SAS, Cognos and Business Objects/Crystal Reports, all have some sort of plugin for Excel whereby it can be linked to a
Re:What tools can they use? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since we didn't have money for a full OLAP solution (even crystal reports was really out of our budget -- hell, even taking time to write the reports oursleves was out of our time budget), our solution was to build SQL views that were simplified and set up ODBC source on managers machines and then offer a small class (a couple hours) on how to use it.
It gave the managers an interface they new (excel) and we knew they had right data. And if we changed stuff in the database, we could just redefine those views (with the same columun names), and there sheets would go right on working.
You wouldn't belive the stuff a bean counter who has been working in excel for years can churn out in minutes. Charts, graphs, interactive "what if" scenarios by driving formulas off the values in certain input cells.
Hell, I bash Microsoft Office all the time, but Excel rocks, even though I don't use it much.
Re:What tools can they use? (Score:3, Insightful)
I will single out IT Depts -- On many occassions, I've seen IT actually fight to prevent users from using programming tools (even if it's just VB or Access). If the only programming tool on one's programmable computer is the Excel macro language, people have little other choice but to use it. Usually IT's reasoning is some "enterprise J2EE initiative" or "next years ERP implemenation" or some other phony politics.
(And even if a poor luser gets his hands on VB, good luc
if you count the costs (Score:3, Interesting)
Once a spreadsheet has grown beyond the trivial, and it starts using macro's and pieces of VB, it has become a software program.
Why do so many people assume that anyone with a bit of brains can write decent professions software (i.e. with certain quality standards)? Who don't they think that anyone with a bit of brains can design a building or a bridge?
Instead it wou
Re:What tools can they use? (Score:3, Insightful)
More than once I have had a relative ask me for advice about a spreadsheet that has become unmanageable. They lay down a set of requirements that obviously call for a custom database app written by a programmer. I tell them to hire someone to write it. A contractor or even an inte
Loses 10 Billion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Spreadsheets get used in weird places (Score:4, Interesting)
ESA has a similar facility, as does NASA Goddard. And from what I've heard contractors like Boeing have experimented with the same kinds of ideas.
Re:Spreadsheets get used in weird places (Score:2)
I am currently working on an internal project to improve and standardise the trace output from our software.
Managers and team leaders who I talk to about it keep saying things like "If you do it that way I can import it into excell" as if that is going to solve all their problems.
Unfortunately, .xls in the new language of management.
and how were these data collected? (Score:2)
And how were these data collected?, and the conclusions therein derived?
A spreadsheet, perhaps?
This will cost you... (Score:2, Interesting)
What was in that other worksheet? Oh, everyone's salaries
Spreadsheets vs. programming languages (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason spreadsheets provide superior debugging versus language-based software is that they instantly display the intermediate results of the formula every time the inputs or formulae change. Change one number in the inputs and the programmer can instantly see the intermediate and final calculations and do a visual sanity check on the results. In contrast, language-based software creates several impediments such as a manual edit-compile-run cycle, manual/isolated debugging statements, and few easy ways to visually monitor all the values of all the intermediate variables.
Don't get me wrong, spreadsheets have some severe limits. First, they can provide too much power to developers with too little experience/competence. If the developer is an idiot, they are more likely to be able to create a spreadsheet than a program, but just as likely to create (and not find) serious logical error. Programming languages, to some extent, create a barrier that blocks morons (not always). Second, spreadsheets don't scale to large/complex problems very easily. Some of this reflects the monopolist state of the spreadsheet market -- the lack of competition for Excel means that it has not substantively improved in the last decade. (e.g., why is Excel still limited to 256 columns?!?!?).
This is the problem, not the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I have met several people who claimed to be "computer experts" based solely on their Lotus 1-2-3 / Quattro Pro / Excel expertise. It's all well-and-good to create a spreadsheet; but just like computer programming, you need some sort of development and quality control methodology. Too often (like, in say 99.999% of the cases) there is a single user creating a single spreadsheet that eventually controls some aspect of the way a business is run. There is no quality review; there is merely a, "yeah, that number looks right" phase.
I've seen it too many times. It's endemic in business. I'm not surprised with the results of the study ("Spreadsheets considered bad"), though I'd rank the monetary valuation right up with the report I read 2 years ago, "Slow modems cost US businesses $4B yearly!").
Computers - Better Mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
Spreadsheet functionality enables people to bury calculations and they become legacy tools within departments. They are like some of the worst spaghetti code. Someone who may be a serious spreadsheet jock develops a neat tool and it gets implemented in his/her department. The jock leaves, but the tool stays and continues to be used, despite the fact that no one left really knows how it works. Even assuming that there are no errors in it, as circumstances change, the spreadsheet might not produce the "correct" answer, but everyone accepts the answer produced by the legacy spreadsheet because "that's the way we've always done it." And, should someone attempt to modify the spreadsheet, they could get bitten by buried or misunderstood calculations.
Also, spreadsheets enable executives to embed assumptions and play "what ifs" with their forecasts, which is good. But then they use the scenarios they like best to get their pet projects approved using some rather suspect forecasts that "must be true because that's what Excel says the results are."
Spreadsheets are valuable tools, but, like any tool, you can get bitten if you don't really understand what you're using.
John
Whoa slow down (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming these errors are uniformly distributed, there are roughly equal numbers of errors in the positive and negative directions. The idea that such money is just vanishing from our economy is flat out wrong.
And even if the errors are heavily biased in one direction, the money is still somewhere, it's just being less efficiently distributed.
Spreadsheets vs. Databases (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about everything in many companies is tracked on spreadsheets. Expenses, costs, estimates, budgets, projects, etcetera so on so forth.
Often times, employees will use spreadsheets when a database (even Access) should've bene used. As soon as the spreadsheet becomes 'mission-critical' and contains information that is used to run the business and cannot be lost, you'll start to see employees whose sole job is to feed, maintain, and munge that spreadsheet. When data's in a format like Excel that can be shakey, you can see data errors start to build up when one page is dependent on another page which is dependent on another page which is dependent on some figure buried back in cell DA256 on Page 5 of the workbook... which is dependent on some other figure
And the worst part is that it's usually impossible to trace these errors back because there's no way to take a step away from it or a debug tool.
(How do I know this? I write custom software for small businesses that realize that they can't continue doing business the way they're doing it.)
Re:Spreadsheets vs. Databases (Score:2)
Silos of Information Cost Money (Score:2)
Article Has Spreadsheet Error (Score:5, Funny)
>... $165,000 times 9 times 500. That amounts to just shy of three quarters of a billion dollars. And is that anywhere near realistic? No. It is probably safe to say that corporate America, for example, loses in excess of $10bn annually ...
Can You Spot The Spreadsheet Error?
Cell B1 = $165,000
Cell B2 = 9
Cell B3 = 500
Cell B4 = B1*B2*B3
Cell B5 = $10 BILLION
KPMG anthem (Score:2)
chorus
KPMG, we're strong as can be
A team of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.
KPMG, we're strong as can be
A dream of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.
verse one
We create, we innovate
We pass the ones that are la-a-ate.
A global team, this is our dream of success that we create.
We'll be number one, with effort and fun
Together each of us will run for gold that shi
up and down. (Score:2)
What's wrong with spreadsheets (Score:2)
Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
I made a couple spreadsheets recently, and here's what I found:
Fragile references
They're still referencing virtually everything by [A-Z]\d+. This is beyond GOTO considered harmful - when Dijkstra made that claim, we at least could do "goto blah" instead of "GOTO 2050".
Excel has a couple "solutions", neither of which are good:
Massive code duplication
In my spreadsheet today, I ended up with whole columns of formulas like this:
I would have much rather made a function FedIncomeTax(AdjustedGrossIncome) that applied that same bracket logic. Once. And called it the N times necessary. You can define VBA functions, but I didn't see a way to reference cells from them. (Probably because it doesn't have a reliable way to do the dependency/error tracking seamlessly. I can think of how I'd accomplish that in Python...but Python is a very flexible language.)
Unreadable code
There's no way to put longer bits of properly-indented, commented code in there. Certainly related to the above; you're trying to cram way too much stuff into a cell (or group of cells) that's massively repeated, so no one even thinks of doing this.
Poor layout
The result looks poor in a couple ways:
Poor charting abilities
It didn't have much support for charts with confidence intervals. (Don't tell me there's no use for these in finance! They may write everything out to the nearest cent, but that doesn't mean they don't made wild-ass estimates when talking about the future.) If you want to do something like a box-and-whiskers graph, you have to do elaborate tricks [decisionsciences.org]. Even basic error bars have weird defaults; to get a meaningful confidence interval, you have to do custom stuff with ranges. The friendlier check boxes end up with the same-sized error bar for every point, which is worthless.
Overall
Just using Excel for my small needs was frustrating, and it's not because I don't know how to use it. (I can read Help files.) I can easily see how people would screw up badly with them and not notice.
It'd be so much better if there were a more free-form document (no overal grid) you could throw 1-dimensional lists and 2-dimensional tables into. With support for formatting, referencing, and summarizing them well. (There shouldn't be [A-Z]\d+ references at all; the concept shouldn't exist.) Including the PivotTable stuff, of course. (Excel's one good point, though it could be better.)
It also should have support for referencing external data easily - a RDBMS or CSV/
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
TPS reports... (Score:2)
Also, Friday is "kick the accountant in the nuts day". So, go ahead and kick Frank here in the nuts anytime Friday. All right. Any questions? Great!
The math in this article.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"So how much money is the Fortune 500 wasting annually? It is a simple sum: $165,000 times 9 times 500. That amounts to just shy of three quarters of a billion dollars. And is that anywhere near realistic? No. It is probably safe to say that corporate America, for example, loses in excess of $10bn annually through the misuse and abuse of spreadsheets. That's a big number: it suggests a problem worth managing."
Translated: If I take the actual numbers I have, it's a $750mil problem. By some magical feat, however, we can just assume that it's a $10bn problem because it makes my article seem MUCH more important.
How can you possibly just increase the number THIRTEEN TIMES just to suit your needs. Show some integrity.. seriously.
Accountants vs Programmers (Score:3, Insightful)
A programmer would be chastised for: cutting and pasting code; for not using revision control; and for obscured or hidden behaviour. Yet spreadsheet users commoly have all 3 problems.
The problem is that spreadsheets have become increasingly complex without a corresponding adjustment to formal specification. Imagine if you were using a programming language that doesn't have formal type declarations.
The are tools that assist businesses using visual modelling (much like scientists use) that can help detect and prevent errors in spreadsheets. Have a look at...
XempleX [xemplex.com] or their product sheet Xemplex Product Overview [xemplex.com].
p.s. I'm not affiliated with this company.
Be Afraid, be very afraid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Click here [lfp.uba.ar] for a link to one of his recent critiques entitled:
On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003
Here is a nice quote from the above paper:
"...persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution...Persons desiring to conduct statistical analyses of data are advised not to use Excel 2003."
"Excel is like a bikini. What it reveals is suggestive, but what it conceals is vital." -- apologies to Aaron Levenstein
Code reviews! (Score:3, Insightful)
Code reviews - give your spreadsheet to a buddy to check over. Have him or her review all the calculations. If you haven't explained them well enough, add comments.
Change control - if you update your spreadsheet, keep old versions around and make a note of what you change. Find all numbers that total up different in this new version and explain why.
Etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying that we should treat everyone else like programmers, or spreadsheets like programs. But a few simple practices like that and your PHB gets to claim that he personally saved the company $10B (and fixed the Internet).
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
When was the last time your manager asked for best practices instead of dictating them?
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
You could have saved yourself some money and downloaded and installed Cygwin for free.
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
My money is worth less then my mental healh. Yet I only pay in money when using Mac/OSX, learning linux costs both (I still need to buy a computer to run linux on).
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:4, Informative)
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
Indeed.. time for something new. Spreadsheets, the poor man's database, are finally beginning to die out. Good riddance! Make way for RAD tools and web database applications! Any organization that stores important data in spreadsheets has something severely wrong with their IT department.
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:4, Funny)
Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful (Score:2)
Have you ever seen an actual dead-tree spreadsheet? I bet not. Boring, but functional.
Computer spreadsheets should not be innovative. Lots of functions, auditing, macros, import/export, graphing, sheet linking and database attachment capabilities, but no innovation!!
If OOo 1.1 took all the stuff from Excel 97 that it doesn't have now, it would be the perfect spreadsheet.