Instead of only considering a consultant, the company should have a developer on staff to work on small tasks like this. The cost gradually decreases as they learn the business and don't need everything explained from scratch.
That's what's frustrating about these anti-Excel discussions.
Ok. What happens when I say that the company bought another company and it had a product line that the new company wanted to pay sales people commissions on? And the compensation plan around it was complex.
For whatever reasons, that's not a report the DBA was up for developing from scratch (or, someone decided his time wasn't to be used that way). That's just the reality.
We can talk about what should have been or what ought to have been, but that doesn't change the reality.
The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.
Yes, like a janitor for example.
> The reality is that I ended up doing most of it ACCURATELY in Excel.
Yes it's the hammer for all your nails. You could also use Python+Jupyter. There are selfhosted and managed versions.
Because of guys like you, municipial installations run their sewage system with an excel sheet because some guy implemented a vba macro to talk to the sewage api endpoint.
let it go.
Or maybe not, and they’d just hire more people solely to calculate commission :/
- The process involved 2 people checking my work before it was sent to payroll. And we did catch and correct mistakes. We were able to trace back where and how the mistakes were make, and build in ways to prevent or flag future mistakes.
- The job was necessary because of all the garbage in the database. Excel's data-checking and data-cleansing and flexibility was superior to the database.
- After 1 year all of my work was audited. For several dozen sales people, there was ONE person I wasn't 100% accurate with. And that one was off by 0.5%. SUCCESS!
- If we'd gone with the report coming out of the database, things would have been such a confused mess.
But ok. So what you are saying your Excel was reviewed by somebody else. How is this any different from reviewing somebody else’s code?
I work in a company where even the least technical analysts are capable of using numpy. We have libraries to use Google Sheets as input-output data. So you get the best of the two worlds.
What does Excel resolve here?
And I also do not believe that a python script would not do the same cleansing of the data in a much more maintainable way.
Why didn't you jump in and help us?
Also I am going to underline that what you did was relevant 16 years ago; which you did not state in your initial message about the usefullness of Excel.
Which is kinda funny, if I didn’t ask you would have otherwise omitted a lot of otherwise relevant information which makes your opinion even less important.
It only makes me question why do you take this whole thread so personally? Probably because by now your skills are way less relevant than back in 2005.
What is the first tool a BA would reach for for most of these problems?