Why Microsoft Excel Won't Die (economist.com) 85
The business world's favourite software program enters its 40th year. The Economist: Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders -- though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells).
Such snafus have not dented Excel's dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren't ready to be filtered out just yet.
Such snafus have not dented Excel's dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren't ready to be filtered out just yet.
Why would anybody want it to die? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why would anybody want it to die? (Score:5, Insightful)
Software that does a simple job well is valuable. Excel also brings a bunch of dubious upsell bullshit for a million vaguely related use cases, but "Do some math on a bunch of numbers" is what computers were built for.
Re:Why would anybody want it to die? (Score:4, Informative)
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The key problem with AI is to verify the results. Way way way back in the days of grade school, the idea of, "show your work" was done so a teacher could see the thought process for coming up with an answer. For AI, it's around as useful as just pulling the answer out of its ass, it shouldn't be trusted YET.
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Excel is very complex. I picked up the original Lotus 123 very quickly, when it had no GUI. Because Lotus had a decent and quick help system that was easy to use. It was also very simple. Excel on the other hand has always confused me, its help is confusing, and it keeps adding new and pointless features so that it extremely complex. Anything complex enough to have a Windows style "ribbon" needs to be simplified.
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Help in Excel? The best help for me has been Google to figure out some of the more obscure syntaxes.
One of the absolutely most horrendous things with Excel is that the CSV format is dependent on your localization settings where you have:
English - '.' for decimals and ',' for field separation.
Swedish - ',' for decimals and ';' for field separation.
So when an external program creates a CSV file it's of course in the English format and to read it then you need to pre-process it to get the localized format.
Then
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Here's the lesson:
You should not use CSV, it does not actually have a standard, and in fact has several competing de-facto standards. It is implicitly a danger to your software's consistency.
TSV is supported by almost every piece of major software that uses CSV and has a standardized format.
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A little bit of history, I knew people who worked a lotus in the 90s.
Microsoft and IBM ensured Lotus that OS/2 will replace Windows/DOS. Lotus, being a small company focused on developing for OS/2 instead of Windows. So, when Windows 95 came out, Lotus had no product for it, but guess who did? That is how Excel took over.
From what I heard, the OS/2 version was very good. I also think Word Perfect was scammed in the same manner.
Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The company I work for makes a complicated piece of enterprise software. The tool we made to feed new data into the system is all Excel based. It spits out Excel sheets, you fill them in with your data, and it loads it back in. We use Excel because we asked what people wanted, and every single user said Excel. We have tools to do direct data feeds from other databases, or just about any other data source, but most people use the Excel tool for the initial data load.
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but most people use the Excel tool for the initial data load
Yeah that's one of the nice legacy issues. Most people want to use Excel for a data load into a complex tool because prior to implementing the complex tool they stored that data in Excel.
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Dataloader for Salesforce by chance?
SalesForce (Score:2)
No, and our tool predates that one :)
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It came as a huge surprise to me when I learned, upon taking a new job several years ago, that quite a lot of the worlds process automation is based around excel spreadsheets - the process is designed in Excel first using boxes, lines and other things, and then this is imported into the actual process automation tool using an ancient Excel plugin to interpret the "design" and output code.
It was actually horrifying to see.
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You could easily work for my company and make that exact same statement (Do you??)
Business people love Excel. Non-Techy people can use Excel. ..and to be clear.. it's just an XLSX file.. We don't even really care if someone is using Excel or OpenOffice or whatever.. it's just a super flexible file format and one we'll have to support for Import and Export probably "forever".
Hey I created a great UI for that!
--> Can't I just upload my spreadsheet?
--> Can you make your UI look like a spreadsheet?
We supp
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Using Excel to tabulate and display data is fine.
A few simple macros are also okay.
But writing complicated macros to encode business processes is dysfunctional.
It is far better to have separate programs in Python, Java, or VB that pull the data from the spreadsheets, and are subject to code reviews and source control.
Re:Why would anybody want it to die? (Score:4, Interesting)
In such a case, there are no requirements documents or specifications or anything so replacing Excel becomes difficult since the first step is massive reverse engineering. And, depending on who does the work, the separate programs aren't always better. Although they certainly can be if done by good people using good process.
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Using Excel to tabulate and display data is fine.
A few simple macros are also okay.
But writing complicated macros to encode business processes is dysfunctional.
It is far better to have separate programs in Python, Java, or VB that pull the data from the spreadsheets, and are subject to code reviews and source control.
This, this, this, and this, to the skies!
Excel is fine for simple stuff. But for many users, Excel is a hammer in search of a nail. Often they know nothing else.
My biggest beef with Excel (and similar tools) is that it is write-only. Sure, when you're facing a deadline to crunch out a reduction of tabluar data, it can be a time-saver. But good luck six months later, when you look at the same spreadsheet and wonder what you did. "What was that equation I put in this cell over here? What other cells reference
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That's the big snag with modern spreadsheets, they try to do something extremely complex but without a language or means of managing complexity. Why use $A5 when you can use a variable? Yes, Excel has this stuff, but it's rarely used because that's not what users were trained on. Sometimes you just need some basic programming language like logic When someone gives me an Excel sheet and wants me to modify it without breaking it, I panic. Because it has no comments, no documentation, not reasonably named
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But writing complicated macros to encode business processes is dysfunctional.
It is far better to have separate programs in Python, Java, or VB that pull the data from the spreadsheets, and are subject to code reviews and source control.
Having been on both sides of this, this is a lovely idea in theory that often fails in practice. Having to rely on IT developers to write business-critical software in a timely manner is either cost prohibitive or takes far too long.
A good example from my own experience was from working at a large footwear & apparel company during the outset of the pandemic. Suddenly there were huge port congestion issues at various ports in Asia causing the system-predicted lead times to suddenly be far too short. T
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I've encountered gigabyte-plus Excel spreadsheets full of spaghetti code encoding critical business functions before (I ran away as fast as I could!) If something is so complex that it needs more than half a dozen macros then it should be in a database. Unfortunately the DB interfaces are uniformly horrible and executives refuse to learn how to use them, so we're going to be stuck with this cruft for years to come.
One of the unsung heroes of the Y2K effort was the team which dealt with the electricity tra
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If a handyman comes to do
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Go on, finish the analogy. Post -- or just imagine -- a Slashdot headline asking why table knives won't die.
The fact that you think people misuse the tool sometimes doesn't mean that it's not the right tool often enough to continue existing.
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However, the analogy doesn't actually hold. That doesn't take away any entertainment value but the failure should be pointed out.
DIY projects are about doing things that have already been done before and have a known procedure. You just need to follow the procedure. And the first step should be acquiring the necessary tools.
The types of business projects that get done in Excel are things that don't have well d
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It's a solution that works and replacing Excel would be a solution searching for a problem.
That's actually not true at all. In many cases Excel does the bare minimum but isn't sufficient. Excel is a great little tool for storing data in a bunch of sheets. But in most situations where a project attempts to replace Excel it's because Excel is too limited in what it does, or the dataset has grown unmanageable, or management has asked to report some new data that can't be extracted from Excel alone, or you need to interface with other databases in ways Excel doesn't support.
There are many problems wi
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I've never heard of an "Excel replacement project," but it's certainl
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Other than that nobody at all, who actually uses it.
Never a kind word about Microsoft leaves my lips, but SPREADSHEETS are a remarkable tool that is usable by both amateurs and experts for many many different purposes. It is unusually easy to start using and is extensible pretty much as far as you can imagine, as I have seen in my professional life and as many others below point out.... you can do ridiculously complex things with a spreadsheet if you pu
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There's plenty of reasons for Excel to die, and plenty of reasons for it not to.
Spreadsheets existed long before computers - they usually were chalkboards of numbers that people edited and others had to recalculate. When VisiCalc came out, this was a breakthrough in that you can update numbers and have the calculations performed automatically.
For things like data analysis, they do things in a quick and easy format. And heck, putting data in a quick tabular format is often a convenient way to organize stuff.
It's annoying when it gets used as a (Score:2)
VBS macros (Score:2)
Resources (Score:2)
I know someone who had foisted upon them a resource planning tool for managing thousands of employees across multiple sites and groups, completely written in Excel, VBS macros, and the PivotTable extension. You ran the "master sheet" script and it would pull from other workbooks, creating a massive report in the main workbook. It was basically a complex relational database built using spreadsheets, with no constraint or relationship management at all.
Finally their IT department built something to replace it
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Another, more interesting way of putting it is, "We tend to formulate our problems in such a way as to make it seem that the solutions to those problems demand precisely what we already happen to have at hand." - Abraham Kaplan, 1964
Re: Resources (Score:1)
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This is because it's what he already happens to have at hand.
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However:
after you have used the hammer, most of it looks like a bleeding thumb!
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Someone here used to have the tag line, "If your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like the back of a skull." Haven't seen it for a long time now.
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Obviously. SharePoint isn't useful for anything. Avoid it like the plague.*
* Having seen many people's reactions to the last plague, we might to reconsider using this phrase.
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I think it was done in SharePoint, and it wasn't as good.
No need to recite a tautology.
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I assume you're talking about VBA, right?
VBA has been disabled in Excel for years already. You have to go through a bunch of security hoops to enable it, overriding warnings that will make any IT department scream in horror.
VBA macros haven't been an issue since a few years after the "I love you" virus made them an existential security risk.
What could go wrong (Score:3)
Oh sure, take the bit of software which causes errors because of obscure gotchas, and give it AI so it can blindly blunder into those gotchas without any human input at all. I can't possibly understand why AI PCs aren't flying off the shelves.
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"Lines should line up; that's what they're FOR!" (Score:4, Insightful)
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To be fair, if it's anything like the ones I produce, it's not that the data doesn't require calculations, it's that the spreadsheet is just the final output format from another process that does the heavy lifting.
The real work is in the database, the XLS file just is an easy way to distribute the resulting data in a way that nontechnical users can filter, sort, and add fields to. But any of the calculations were done behind the scenes creating the file and aren't ever part of the output sheet.
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Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering (Score:5, Insightful)
"No matter what the actual requirements document says, what your users really want is for you to implement Excel for them."
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Re: Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering (Score:2)
It's one of the better Microsoft products (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as I dislike Microsoft, Excel has its place. I use it for planning purposes, mainly budgets, and the occasional data recording (temporary recording before transferring data to processing software). Also works for mocking up rough schedule drafts, drafting a simple table to be ingested elsewhere, tracking tasks when a multirow, multicolumn table is needed, or for storing lookup tables to be used in software elsewhere.
So plenty of uses, especially if much math is not really needed. But the moment serious calculations come into play ... yeah, not so much. Unless you are very careful. Returns diminish quickly and other tools are just more appropriate / better / faster / more reliable.
In the end, not surprising. Spreadsheets *do* have their place.
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Every other spreadsheet tool is a niche case useful tool, but Excel is the top.
"Might artificial intelligence steal its crown?" (Score:3, Informative)
Such snafus have not dented Excel's dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated.
You literally can't trust the output of "A.I." to be correct. Ever
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This. Times 1000.
Taking a small business level application and adding "AI" to it will only multiply the problems.
The problem with Excel isn't Excel. When used by home users and small businesses as intended, it is fine.
But like most of you I have seen large enterprises abuse the shit out of it for stuff it was never intended to do. Don't blame the tool. Blame the carpenter.
There are several enterprise capable options available in the real world for 10+ years which are multi user, multi dimensional, have
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Most people don't want "correct" they want the answer they are arguing for.
Do not always need 100% correct (Score:2)
You literally can't trust the output of "A.I." to be correct. Ever
True, but you typically do not use machine learning in circumstances where you need it to be 100% correct all the time. For example, in particle physics we use machine learning algorithms to separate signal events from background events. The standard selection criteria that they replace are never 100% accurate in separating the two so you always have to measure the signal efficiency and background rate remaining.
What you can do is measure these parameters for a trained ML algorithm and then trust that i
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That phrase, "Machine learning" says it all. It needs to be trained before it will know how to do something well. Move to the next step, the AI knows how to do a limited number of things, so will be good for automation.
False blaming of Excel for UK bad Covid19 counts (Score:2)
The idiots at England's PHE (Public Health England agency) used an archaic file format, XLS from 1987, that could only take 65K rows. Excel can have over a million rows on a sheet.
Re: False blaming of Excel for UK bad Covid19 coun (Score:2)
Over a million? Seriously? Then Excel hasn't learned its lesson and is repeating the same mistake over and over again. We just have to wait for the next disaster, when someone will try to paste two million rows in a new format spreadsheet.
But you're right that idiot users are to blame... but for using Excel in the first place, rather than for incorrect use of Excel (because Excel is laughably easy to be used incorrectly). Their bosses that allowed using Excel for serious data handling are no less to blame.
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Excel 97/2003 uses the xls from 1980s
the new format with million rows is 2007.
Sure, people can pontificate about using actual database, but then which one with which datatypes, and how do you export it another person/party. LOTS of assumptions and things can go wrong. I can't even thing of a good solution and I work with Oracle, MariaDB/Mysql, Postgresql, and DB2 You'd have a disaster trying any of those for a sharable database.
Re: False blaming of Excel for UK bad Covid19 cou (Score:2)
The actual format of Excel files changed at least three times until 97/2003, although it's true that all these changes were relatively minor compared to the xls->xlsx transition.
ANY relational database would be vastly more suitable than Excel... Even (gasp) MS Access, if they want to stay withing MS Office confines. And basic usage of Access is about as easy to a beginner as Excel.
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Ah, but Excel was included in the basic MS Office license, while Access was an extra cost.
Excel has value (Score:2)
Like anything that "won't die", Excel has value and allows a user to create results/work faster and cheaper than not using it. Same goes for Word, computer mice, keyboards, color monitors, the Internet, photocopiers, and tons of other office tools.
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You mean it allows any yahoo to bang together something in Excel and foist it on people who have no choice but to use his/her pile of rat droppings. The percentage of people who can use Excel well pales in comparison to the legions to think they can but are blindly misguided.
Excel is a great tool, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
... it sucks as a programming language
There are no built in tools for visualizing and managing the complexity that can be created, and it's possible to create an insane amount of complexity with it
Re:Excel is a great tool, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are no built in tools for visualizing and managing the complexity
Excel literally has a Python interpreter for complex data visualisations built into it. But then honestly I struggle to come up with a scenario where you need to create and visualise complexity in Excel. The whole point of Excel is literally the opposite, take something complex, simplify it, and then display the simple result.
Despite it's capabilities (like the aforementioned Python interpreter) if you're visualising complexity in Excel you're using the wrong tool for the job.
Google Shits (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone who's had to deal with Google Shits knows why Excel wont die.
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Anyone who's had to deal with Google Shits knows why Excel wont die.
Yeah, I've been working on a document I keep in Google Docs for ease of portability. I created a simple little graph for a scenario based on some modified sine waves in Excel. I wanted to keep the data supporting the graph in case I want to change it in the future, so I though just upload it next to my doc. Google did many bad things to my simple little graph that was a much greater pain to fix than in Excel.
It has become a commodity (Score:2)
These days, it doesn't matter whether you actually have Excel. You can use Google Sheets, or LibreOffice, or any of a number of unknown brands that you might encounter on various websites. They all work for what most people need, and they all produce interchangeable files. It's as ubiquitous as Notepad.
With great power comes great fuck-up-ability (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would Excel die? It's not like literally any of the alternatives would make the problems disappear. Hidden cells, spreadsheet errors, that is a function of every spreadsheet. Misclassifying data happens all the time in databases. As for the COVID cases hitting the cell limit, they weren't using "Excel", they were using a woefully old and outdated copy of Excel and saving files in the previous file format, they literally wouldn't have had that problem if they were up to date.
Excel is a tool. A tool can be used for good, or for evil. Just because a Philips head screwdriver isn't very good at driving nails into the wall doesn't mean you shouldn't use it with Philips head screws.
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Excel also does MONEY incorrectly and every accountant has just gone along with it not knowing except maybe some really old ones long ago who remember banker's rounding and didn't know what a float was. they still don't know what a float is or why you don't store money in one. To think of all the tons of money just floating around ... except for the few who collect it over time... while the rest just don't bother to deal with it.
Money is integer math; in pennies which BTW, almost everything on earth goes d
I just wish Excel/Others would copy Apple Numbers (Score:3)
Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program is awesome. If you've ever used it, it's way different than any other spreadsheet program and is geared more toward data presentation. But it's SO fantastic for data presentation! I wish everyone else's spreadsheets worked more like numbers, or had similar functionality.
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic... Numbers is still deficient compared to Excel in many presentation features. Numbers' graphing is sub-par, especially for math/engineering; specifying series for plotting is also painful. You can't do text rotation in cells. You can't have multiple formats (bold, regular, and italic) in a single cell.
Basic stuff like that.
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Yes, there are a lot of reasons I don't actually use Numbers.
But the ability to make tables and put them wherever you like on a page and have them all talk to each other is awesome!
Huh? (Score:3)
SI Units (Score:2)
Oh please Microsoft add the support numbers in SI engineering units.
I just want to see 120p instead of 1.2E-07.
At least CCalc has done this since forever.
Wrong tool for the job (Score:1)
having worked in bulge bracket investment banks (Score:3)
Billion dollar business decisions are made on the back of an 80MB excel "net asset value model" that takes minutes to recalculate because it's a labyrinth of references, built by sleep a deprived 23 year old analyst at 2am, overseen by a sleep deprived 25 year old associate, with one final check by a distracted Vice President.
Of that entire stack...the software is probably the LEAST concerning part.
CSV (Score:1)
Excel is the only tool for number crunching (Score:1)
Try building a financial model in anything else but excel..then tracing dependencies and auditing it if there are problems. You just can't do that anywhere else but excel (RIP Lotus 123). If you just need to track details for your PTA then Google sheets are fine. If you need Xlookup and Macros, excel stands alone.
Don't need it (Score:1)
Don't blame the tool (Score:2)
I use OpenOffice Calc at home since I really only track expenses. Even though there are many similar functions to Excel, it's just clunky to use and some simple Excel functions appear much more difficult in Calc (though I can admit some of that could be chalked up to my unfamiliarity).
My only complaint with Excel today is they keep adding "feature" or enhancin
Give it time and it becomes a commodity (Score:2)
It's interesting that there's this intuition that a piece of common software over time will become a commodity: cheap and you can't make money with it. Somehow a package can remain a cash cow for a very long time. How come? You can keep adding features but if people decide they don't need those features they aren't going to pay for them.
There is the lockin from file compatibility. "Yeah but to really have reliable formatting you best use Word and not some cheap alternative" .