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."

Comments

Re:please everybody

[ChiaBen]

You shouldn't be forced to use SQL for manipulating data, you should be restrained from using Excel. ;) The reality of the differences between a spreadsheet and a database is that a spreadsheet lacks the data constraints (relationships) necessary to keep a user from entering bad data. A database can control this (data integrity) to a large degree (depending on your datamodel design).

An example I fight with daily is product attributes. I maintain a n ecommerce database with about 180,000 products, each of which would have, say, a color. The problem is that if I import data from a spreadsheet it might randomly insert spaces in the data (i.e. "Black " or " Black" instead of "Black"), whereas if I get the data entered through our tools, the user selects from a list of colors, and only if the choice doesn't exist do they add a new one.

You mention how people are doing a knee-jerk that 'DB's are sacred'. Yes, they are. So are spreadsheets, the problem is that people bastard-ize their use and end up confused about why they both exist, and how to use them.

Database = Data storage, data consistency, ease of data maintenance
Spreadsheet = Data analysis, data redundancy, lack of data integrity.

That's how I see it, anyhow.