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Comment by ssdspoimdsjvv | Hacker News Reader

Excel is the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail. It is very flexible, powerful and beginner-friendly. And while you can solve a lot of problems with it, some of those should be handled by other programs (or other people). The problem is that the average Excel user doesn't have the right knowledge to judge what the best solution is to their problem. And sometimes it only becomes clear after long use that they have created an unwieldy tool which causes many unforeseen problems.

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Again. What's the comparable alternative?

This is so frustrating because I've worked in small departments in an international company. Our problems were too small to get consistent, needed help from IT and we weren't important enough to get one of the limited licenses to the fancy reporting system.

Ultimately, there's all this bad talk about evil Excel, but we get no help or other resources.

And what about all the junk reports that were coming out of the company database that no one wanted to spend the money to fix?

THE ONLY VIABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS EXCEL.

No. it's not the only alternative. it's the only thing you and many other accept. Python+Jupyter is a real alternative.

You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.

exactly. because he does not see a problem with this because people like you tell him it's the only solution since dawn of excel.

But when developers complain they have to learn domain specific items, people say the shall keep up with the times. but suddenly the analysts and the others are exempt from this?

Real life doesn't always provide ideal solutions. In your case, using Excel is probably the easiest or even only way to do what's needed. That doesn't mean it's the best, or even a good solution. If it causes organization-wide problems, whoever runs your organization should make sure better processes are instilled. The only thing you can do is make it clear to the person above you and hope things improve.

We're closer in agreement. And I'd never suggest that Excel was the best solution or even a good solution at times. (I hated the tedious error-prone things that I used to do in Excel.)

I'm just offering the context from which weird stuff happens. And the answer isn't always as easy as: put it in a database.

The context, the processes (or lack of processes), the decision-makers, budgets, timelines, they all play a part in the outcomes.

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts.

One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

I think the question is what a viable alternative is if the company does not want to spend any more effort than the effort of the singular employee that wants the report.

They can do it by themselves with Excel. Can they do that with any other software?

Yes, some can, but depends on the task.

Not many people would be able to do complex calculations in an RDBMS, especially if it requires joins or grouping. But many more are able to use a GUI tool to create a single database table and import some CSV data.

The recent UK disaster wouldn't have happened if the data had been imported into Access or SQLite instead of an Excel sheet.

Of course it's not a panacea. Badly designed databases can be just as error prone as Excel, but they have different error modes.

R, or Python.

Your position is more reasonably explained than most of the Excel Haters' (I am a card carrying member of the group, btw) but there is an additional problem.

Even if/when the "average Excel user" finally sees the Light ... s/he still has to work in an environment where excel files (including .csv) are the lingua franca.

It's a bit like working for the German (or French or Japanese etc.) branch of a US large company. Of course the official language is English, and all documents should be written in English and emails should be in English and so on. Even if everybody (down to the Janitor?) speak acceptable English and are perfectly able to talk business in English... everyone will still use German unless they have to communicate with someone like me, whose German fluency is rated in Imaginary Numbers.

"The right solution to their problem" being a developer, at least as far as developers are concerned. Hammers and nails...

Sometimes that database feels more like a jetplane when all I need is a hammer for my nail. Excel (or libreoffice calc) is perfect for a lot of stuff, especially those small things that you won't ever do again.

100%

Excel is a UI over a database table. With a bunch of other UI driven math/stats functions built in. It really comes down to a difference between UI driven folks and folks that are code literate.

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