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The Subtle Tyranny Of Spreadsheets
pipingguy writes "I found this link on a CAD-related mailing list which questioned the current state of spreadsheet usage. Since using spreadsheets is often only one step away from PowerPoint mastery, I thought it worthy of submission." An excerpt:
"The second distortion caused by conventional spreadsheets is more subtle. It's described in a 1980s paper, written by university researcher Jeffrey Kottemann and others concerning what they called 'Performance, Beliefs, and the Illusion of Control.' The paper described an experiment in which subjects were asked to perform a planning task using different tools, some of them with elaborate what-if capability and others without it." Yup, it's a ZD/Yahoo link, but it raises good questions."
back in 1997 when I was a physics exchange student in Glasgow, they made me solve a *quantum machanics* problem using excel! it was ridiculous. I kept the spreadsheet just for its absurdity (it's the only .xls file on my entire harddrive)
A manager at a company I worked for was presenting figures for the last year. He showed the financial breakdown for each division, with the profit being calculated as a percentage for each division. At the bottom, there was a summary line showing the total figures for the company and including the "average profit" for the company.
Which he had calculated by summing the profit column and dividing by the number of divisions.
I mentioned that this was producing a somewhat unrealistic figure, with a couple of small divisions showing very good profit margins and the largest department showing a slight loss. "No, that's the mathematical definition of 'median'," he answered.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I've ranted about something similar to this before, but occasionally in the print business I worked at we would get Excel documents to print.
No, they didn't want printed spreadsheets - people would lay out flyers, leaflets, posters and small booklets in Excel.
I can only guess their creative genius had to be instantly addressed and they picked the first app they could think of to lay it out on, and excel was just sitting there loaded at the time.
What's so strange about that? Both are highly unpredictable, so it should work pretty well.
Excel as a database.
Signatures are for stupids.
if you think that's perverse
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Um, why do you want to fit it on a single sheet of paper? It's like saying "I tried to fit the book on a single sheet of paper and it's unreadable".
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
One time when I was working at the computer lab help desk in college, I had a guy who was writing a paper in Excel, one word per cell! He'd just type a word, hit Tab, type the next one, and so on. The question he had was "How do I doublespace my paper?" I was dumbstruck.