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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

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Do not shutdown the global economy. Just maybe move to tools with less issues around process governance:

"The 7 Biggest Excel Mistakes of All Time"

https://www.teampay.co/insights/biggest-excel-mistakes-of-al...

"The financial fails and business risks of spreadsheets"

https://www.webexpenses.com/2020/10/financial-fails-business...

"Nightmare on spreadsheet: take Excel use seriously"

https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2020/o...

"Excel – The Dirty Secret"

https://tax.thomsonreuters.co.uk/blog/excel-the-dirty-secret...

"8 Challenges When Using Excel For Accounting"

https://www.senacea.co.uk/post/excel-for-accounting-challeng...

As though mistakes wouldn’t happen with non-programmers working in R.

In R, you can use accepted methods of software development and engineering, such as version control, automated testing, CI/CD to catch mistakes and prevent them from causing harm. In Excel? Not really.

Do you think the average finance department employee is going to do that?

Especially those departments should do so and learn to do it. Financial departments are always the ones complaining about the cost of mistakes, compliance risks (of the monetary kind) and doing due diligence. Preventing the production of wrong figures in financial excel sheets ticks all those boxes. They should bloody well be doing it, but I'm also not holding my breath ;)

And there are massive bugs in programs that use these tools like the Linux kernel still.

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