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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs (wsj.com)
Tatyana Shumsky, reporting for WSJ: Adobe's finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company. The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets. From there they can see which groups are hiring and how salary spending affects the budget. "I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," Mr. Garrett said. He is working on cutting Excel out of this process, he said. CFOs at companies including P.F. Chang's China Bistro, ABM Industries and Wintrust Financial are on a similar drive to reduce how much their finance teams use Excel for financial planning, analysis and reporting (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available). Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn't kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn't automatically updated.
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
nor is it an invoicing system. If you're a small company you can get away with using it as such. In the 70s they were probably still better than paper. But it always amazing and mildly frightens me how many folks in big companies still use it for major parts of their business because, hey, it's already there and I know how to use it.
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Excel is the case in point use of Law of the instrument.
In engineering I've seen Excel used to share images, a database, run a production line with some VBA/oracle black magic integration.
"I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," .......If this is the case they need to have that data in some sort of format that is useful. It sounds to me like he is simply looking to replace Excel rather than get rid of it. If he's replacing it with something the company will most likely need to train employees on it. This process will in turn create more time wasted.
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Yes, Excel is a staple in work environments... but what software out there can replace it that is just effective? I know some consulting groups would love to replace it with their own, expensive solution. However, for 99.99% of what is out there, LibreOffice Calc, Numbers, or Excel can do the job well.
I've had so many requests and interviews for projects to consolidate excel files made by managers for years. Worst case was a multi-branch bank where EVERY branch and a different version of excel records and they needed to import the data into an Oracle database. Which proves the statement, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Give people the impression they can do more than they in fact can effectively, and you have a mess on your hands. Excel was never designed to be a database, never claimed to be in fairness to MS and other spreadsheet makers, but unfortunately that is what people primarily used excel for in small-medium offices. But hey, it keeps development consulting firms flush with cash to fix it afterwards. A significant portion of the IT industry would probably have to change their business model if people in the SMB group finally wise up and start using read databases instead of cheating with excel. And since industrial level database can be obtained for free, there is really no excuse, except lack of due diligence. That said you can LINK an excel spreadsheet (and LibreOffice Calc) to a real database or even MS Access (but why in god's name would you use MS Access when you can use MariaDB or even Sqlite) and an Excel or (even better) a basic web interface. So many tools have been made to help set these up, it's much easier/faster than it used to be.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
I agree completely with his arguments but I have yet to see any kind of software that is an acceptable replacement that provides the flexibility that Excel does. Excel lets you import any kind of data you want and manipulate it endlessly, something that custom software solutions are almost uniformly horrendous at.
Management wants me to use XYZ software but today my job requires I compare Apples to Dept of Labor statistics and the price of tea in China while doing currency conversions. Excel (or similar spreadsheet programs) is the only piece of software that lets you do that in any reasonable fashion.
If you don't provide your employees better tools for a task, they're going to keep\start using something that's easier for them to use.
I use a shared spreadsheet over OneDrive to share data between locations and groups... Maybe Adobe is too cheap to pay for business hosting, because we all know they have no problems with security issues.
I think this was realized about 20 years ago....
Excel is a powerful tool. It is not the right tool for all the things people try to use it for though. Small one-off projects turn into a decade old report that becomes critical to some groups. How I design an Excel file for a one-off versus something to be used long term are very different. The later requires a lot of thought on to ease of updating and keeping it current. I am a CPA working in private industry (Fortune 500 company). Excel truly runs the world in most places. Our back end system is awful. We actually have three different systems that we have that really are designed to let us get data without having to use the back end system. All three of those make pulling data out of the back end system and into Excel fast and easy. I've always found it pitiful, but it was the same in the late 90's at other places I worked. It would be great if the native system or the things we connect to it could manipulate data the way you can in Excel. It cannot and therefor Excel will be around for a long time to come. The systems will get better but probably never to the point of fully eliminating Excel. I can simply do things in Excel easily and quickly for things that can't take hours/days/weeks/etc of trying to get some system report writer to work on.
The Best tool is the tool you know how to use. If users are critical of database systems, CIOs should pay attention and find out WHY they want to do their work in Excel instead.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
After all these years, are there any programs at all that work like Javelin? Where you create a worksheet (not a spreadsheet) that brings together all the underlying "variables" (simple values or time series data which are automatically converted between days, months, seconds, years, quarters, or whatever)...? Javelin was popular before databases and networks were widespread, but extending its concepts to modern systems could be as simple as defining a "variable" as the result of a SQL query.
It's laughable to read any commentary from anonymous finance chiefs decrying Excel's inability to keep up with "x". These folks truly do not use Excel in any meaningful way. Truly.
Every business person in every industry I've ever worked in (telecom, pharma, housing, transportation, manufacturing) rely on Excel as the glue application for everything. I have to persuade people to use Word instead of Excel for actual documentation requirements, that's how reliant everyone is on this magical tool.
Actuaries use Excel almost exclusively to perform calcs for clients. I don't care who you work for, you're using Excel and not ProVal for the majority of your work.
Engineers use Excel for *everything*. What other application imports and exports to so many different formats, and allows any calculation you can dream up?
You write reports? You write complex reports? Try connecting your queries to Excel and let your end users twist the results on their own. You're not writing layouts any longer, and THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME.
Face it, orgs should roll it out and become Excel experts in house, and use it for as much as they can. For the value it delivers, it's dead-cheap and nobody has an app to match it.
--#
Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s...
I thought this was about Excel, not VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3.
We spent about 30 man hours replacing a persons job that he spent about 30 hours a week on with Java. We collected data from disparate systems and generated a report at the press of a button. So the process went from 30 hours a week to a few seconds.
Is there a better tool out there, for their needs, than Excel? Probably, and more than one.
Is there a silver bullet that will allow users to concentrate entirely on financial and business work, leaving the IT stuff to the tools and a couple IT guys? No.
Where I work the only depts that uses Excel as a system (as in the article) are the ones that don't have money to expend on real apps/systems
In fact, more than once I saw Excel inefficiencies being used as argument for investment on development of custom apps. Provided there's money to do it, once the system is developed, Excel data is migrated and everybody is happy at the end.
What should excel be replaced with?
SQL server because 99.9% of all problem come from trying to use excel as a database instead of a spreadsheet.
Also, stop using Acrobat Reader.
They could just write a macro and some VB code to automate the entire process. Excel can query data from just about any type of data source, and then could pre-process the data, and populate the spreadsheet with fresh data. It's really not that hard to do. Excel is a great tool if used correctly.
Pretty much every reporting/analytic implementation I have worked on always had a requirement to get the data out to an Excel-friendly format. It doesn't matter how fluid/flexible/beautiful of a UI you provide, they want the data in Excel. I think a lot of it is that is very simple to change values and do what-if analysis ("what would our material costs on widget X have to go down to get to a gross profit of Y%"). This is surprisingly difficult to do in implementations like Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Discoverer, etc. Same kind of goes for ad-hoc calculations. We publish dashboards in Tableau, which has decent capabilities for building aggregated functionality, but most of our non-analyst users quickly get lost, and just want their data in Excel. It's the warm blanket that they don't have to relearn. It may be disease ridden, and have holes and worn spots, but it's their "blankee".
I'm sure this guy will spend large wads of cash to force people off of Excel, and one of the first things is replacement will do is to give it back.
I found the 9-5 programmer that went to school for mostly excel.
We are a small organization. Big enough to have a CFO and full-time IT staff, but not big enough to fund a software development team.
Our business changes frequently enough that our CFO needs to model different financial scenarios - and he does it quickly and efficiently with Excel.
Replacing Excel with a more "professional" solution would require retaining developers, hosting an application and data either in-house or in a cloud services provider. Both add cost and reduce the flexibility of our CFO to create models and projections.
I've been in IT for a while now - and I've learned that sometimes you shouldn't try to fix things that aren't broken.
Another problem is that you can't trust Excel to do math properly, especially when dealing with rounding. We found this out when testing a commission system. The SQL code used a precision of 4 decimal points through all the math and did the rounding at the very end. Excel looked like it was doing the same thing but the numbers kept differing by a penny either way.
Turns out Excel was doing implicit data type conversions in the process. The tester had to go back through every step and explicitly change the precision. After that our numbers matched.
The most difficult part was getting the tester to believe that their numbers were wrong and the SQL code was correct.
Store the data somewhere and use appropriate tools to mine it out.
Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs; Ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting hasn't kept up, CFOs say.
By Tatyana Shumsky
Adobe Inc.'s. finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company.
The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheets. From there they can see which groups are hiring and how salary spending affects the budget.
"I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," Mr. Garrett said. He is working on cutting Excel out of this process, he said.
CFOs at companies including P.F. Chang's China Bistro Inc., ABM Industries Inc. and Wintrust Financial Corp. are on a similar drive to reduce how much their finance teams use Excel for financial planning, analysis and reporting.
Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn't kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn't automatically updated.
Older versions of Excel don't allow multiple users to work together in one document, hampering collaboration. There is also a limit to how much data can be pulled into a single document, which can slow down analysis.
"Excel just wasn't designed to do some of the heavy lifting that companies need to do in finance," said Paul Hammerman, a business applications analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.
The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE. This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training.
Adobe switched to Anaplan early last year and many of the tasks previously performed in spreadsheets are now done in the system, maintaining "one source of truth," Mr. Garrett said.
Reports, including about head count, are compiled faster, he said.
P.F. Chang's finance chief Jim Bell said he switched the company to Adaptive Insights from Excel because it fosters collaboration and cuts down on administrative tasks.
Mr. Bell said he was examining how kitchen staff cuts at the company's Boston restaurants affected profitability while on a flight from Spokane, Wash., to Phoenix in early October. The company's northeast regional manager followed along from his office across the country.
"If I was trying to do this on a spreadsheet, it just wouldn't happen," Mr. Bell said.
A year ago, Mr. Bell's team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company's 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes.
Excel has been evolving to better serve its many groups of specialized customers, including in the financial community, said Brian Jones, head of Microsoft's Excel product strategy.
The latest version, launched this summer, allows multiple users to collaborate in a single document, crunch more than 100 million rows of data and comes with automated tools that find trends and suggest visualization, he said.
And while many finance-industry customers might graduate to more specialized software as their needs evolve, most of these solutions have an "export to Excel" button, Mr. Jones said.
"You're still going to use Excel for the things you're not using a tailored solution for," he said.
Excel also has broad reach. Office 365, which includes Excel, has more than 120 million monthly users, said Ron Markezich, Microsoft's corporate
Ah. Evidently these particular finance people are just now discovering ERP systems.
Next, they're going to complain that a monolithic system isn't really flexible enough and they need to move to a cloud based system.
And, hey! Excel integrates with Microsoft's cloud based ERP system. Full circle.
This problem has been solved. These companies solved it years ago. His company just needs to evaluate and buy in to one.
Engineers use Excel for *everything*. What other application imports and exports to so many different formats, and allows any calculation you can dream up?
I can't tell whether you're a troll or just seriously deranged. Have you never heard of R, or python, or MATLAB, or Mathematica?
"...many different formats...", 99% of which are just other Microsoft-proprietary formats so who cares.
Engineering work in Excel is impossible to debug, excruciating to edit or modify, and guaranteed to go wrong if you blink.
And, yes, I've used all of the above tools, including Excel. I know better than to use Excel for anything that matters beyond a basic spreadsheet.
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Back in 2005, it was not about being on different systems, but there was an article entitled The subtle tyranny of spreadsheets and link https://tech.slashdot.org/stor....
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Excel is an existential threat to quality of data in the sciences. Just to scratch the surface, in the bioinformatics domain it's known to corrupt gene identifiers. If that doesn't seem like a big deal, you should realize that pretty much every researcher in big pharma and academia is using Excel to help find cancer treatments you might be taking some day.
Excel is eager to reformat and reinterpret data according to its own bizarre rules, but it's treated as some kind of standard data interchange format. I've seen it cause countless problems where I work.
Eliminating Excel by fiat would force real solutions to be created instead of leaning on tools that were never intended for the purpose.
My (IT) staff and I always joke about how Excel is the #1 reporting tool. Unfortunately, with decades of COTS and other vendor systems in play, the only good way to get any decent real-time reporting with sorting and filtering is in Excel. I just exported my 2016/2017 fiscal year purchases out of our $150M AMS Advantage ERP system into Excel so I can analyse the data correctly. The ERP system simply cannot handle the flexibility i need.
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collectively pay for this advertisement, or did just one of them fund this WSJ piece and the editors threw in the other names to make it look balanced? I'm guessing Anaplan Inc paid for it since their name was mentioned first and last.
Construction company CEOs tell carpenters.
Products like Excel should be the tools that help a person do the task at hand, they should not be the task at hand. Obviously, the infrastructure systems do not do what is needed to help the people do their jobs, so the Excel band-aid was applied. The real solution is to fix the infrastructure systems.
Excel use by information workers doesn't follow the typical patterns of other application software.
Spreadsheets belong to the family of End-User Development software, a research tradition which has more in common with IDEs than with office suites. EUD focus on allowing end users to create automations without the need to understand the logic of classic programming languages, i.e. without learning a formal grammar nor having to follow the execution path of a program runtime in your head.
In spreadsheets, in addition to a simplified domain-specific programming language, you get a dead-simple modeling tool for your data schemas (with simple visual queries), and mixing the data and code in-place, which helps as much as your preferred debugger. End users usually don't get as powerful debugging tools as developers, and spreadsheets are typically the only environment where a clever power user has access to similarly powerful tools.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I'm guessing what would need to happen is teach the excel users to write reports that the ERP system can generate.
Or hire some report writers who can create the desired data sets
-Lot of retraining time and the company won't invest the resources to replicate all the functionality that the analysts will say they need (which they may).
Their multi billion dollar asset tracking system and SEC reporting system involves exchanging excel files. They made a great leap forward by using a common shared drive instead of emailing each other excel files.
They don't even have a version control system, to create an audit trail of changes. The process always starts with "Copy last month spreadsheet into a new name for this month". It is insane. But, on the other hand, had she been sane she might not have married me.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Did he tell them to stop using pdf files first, before stopping the use of Excel?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
nice advertisement for SaaS companies. Software like this (Hyperion, other) has been around for decades that address this problem.
If that's new to these CFO'S they should never have risen to their current positions. They should have actually learned about modern finance tools, EPM, and basic technology before learning neat accounting tricks.
Because his finance guys are going to push back every step of the way. There are many problems with what he wants to achieve but the largest will always be:
Everyone in finance is trained in Excel, Any multitude of ERP interface systems that he wishes to implement will require training for everyone in the department, they will also require custom modification to get the data represented in such a way that will tell him anything useful.
Any ERP system will never give all of the data that the planners want or in the format they want it in. This is because each individual planner has a different method to making any plan, this is a good thing as it will provide a breadth in vision as to possible outcomes and limitations.
By having software that interacts directly with the data you also introduce the ability to create errors with in the one source of information
It sounds like most of his problems would be solved by keeping updates on the latest version of excel, By adding in another software vendor you are not making your process any less error prone even if you think you are.
TBH the entire article seems like an advert for Anaplan and given that the description for it reads: "Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform with documented use cases in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, IT and HR." and we all know how awesome "cloud-based" things are
While far from perfect, google sheets has a crucial advantage: it's a single version for everyone in the company once it is deployed. I have seen departments cut their IT spending significantly by removing Office and its many versions from the users' computers.
Also, it reduces the problem of "did you get the latest version of the spreadsheet the boss edited today at 3:00 AM?" or the many slightly different versions of the same spreadsheet enabled by email and Excel.
The problem he describes is what happens when you don't have a proper database or macros written up. Humans should not be manually importing and exporting data from Excel on any scale. That's what software is for. Databases can pull whatever you program them to pull from Excel sheets. Excel sheets are just a source of data for real software. The data entry and data manipulation work he is describing is what happens when you haven't written the damn software and needs humans to do things the hard way -- manually. However, with narrow and rarely run tasks like an HR calculation that needs to be run once a quarter it may well be cheaper to kill a few man hours quarterly and not bother bringing in coders and starting up a whole project to automate a process so rarely run. That's likely the case here. At large corps there are just thousands of these little rarely run tasks that don't warrant full automation and that keep lots of people employed because collectively 50 or 100 of these kinds of runs every quarter = 1 fulltime job. If he wants to spend the money to really automate all these reports and get rid of the humans -- go for it, but he will quickly find that it will cost something like $10 million to really automate ALL the reporting and replace a few $15 an hour spreadsheet monkeys and that its not worth doing. Corps actually do this calculation all the time. Most of the time they decline to do the IT spend and stick with Excel. When the math goes the other way they call in the coders. Excel isn't the problem. The cost of coding up something else is.
just hire some programmers and build it in house. Pay the programmers well and give them long term career options and they'll make good software instead of crap. I suppose you don't get to take trips to San Francisco every year to hang out at the ERP trade shows if you do that though.
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The problem isn't just that they are all using stale data, repeating each other's work, doing a bunch of clicking, etc. though that's all a colossal waste, the problem is that they don't know if it's right. Excel puts business logic (code) in many cells and one could be different than another, it's hard to peer-review, hard to debug, etc. You cannot do real version control on it, because the data changes all the time, etc. Logic which could be expressed in 20 lines of code become bazillions of counter-intuitive cascading codelets all over the sheets. There are probably a bunch of apps which try to address this problem but they're bags on the sides of a crappy system.
Business logic should be peer-reviewable, should be version controlled, should be commented, etc.
This is why we don't make billing systems in Hypercard. This is why no one in a business situation should be using Excel for anything other than making graphs.
I like how they took their failure to recognize the importance of and enable localized autonomy and Independence, and rediret their failure onto external artifacts. The gift of the gab can make dying sound lifesaving. It just goes to show we have the best con men around in charge of our countries integral resources
That's it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I worked at a company that had several hundred stores. The Helpdesk needed often contact the store manager. However these changed as lot and the stores where devided by districts and the district manager each had their own spreadsheet,
So somehow I got them to sewnd me an updated version each Monday. I mmade a database with the information and put that online on my personal database, just secured by IP adress verification. (That is good enough, right?)
That way Helpdesk people had updated data. Once that was up, I started to add other genral information. Once they saw this, they said "We want that as well" and so the closed source intranet was thrown out, new server orderd and a new intranet was build. Just before I left I said "The easy part was building it. The hard part will be keeping it up to date."
At an other company the managers asked all possible data (In excell that came out of BO where they had access) and just to see what would happen, I once said random data.Nobody cared.
So it is not only important to gather data and put it in a database, but also keep it up to date and see what you actually want to do with it.
The best boss was the one that asked me for data, I asked me what he wanted to do (Increase budget, lower FTE count, proof that the last semester was going in the right direction, ...) and that way I knew how to present the data to help him, without giving false numbers. He was the nest, because he actually understood that the numbers where a means, not an end.
Same for the CEO. Presented some numbers and he just said "I have no idea what those mean, but apparently you do and that is why you have the job. Here is what you asked for in your budget."
And now I work at a company where people get BO mails in PDF that they put in Excell sheets together with other numbers that that people wrote down on paper during the day and run some formula's over it to have pie charts to show every day t other people who show it to their meeting with their N+1 and all the way to the top (Man, I wish I were kidding)
For three people I know they spend 50% of their time doing numbers instead of their actual job. And that are the three I know of. There will be many, many others.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Have you never heard of R, or python, or MATLAB, or Mathematica?
haha.. thats hilarious ! only a tiny tiny minority uses those tools for office work - mostly because they're useless for those tasks.
99% of which are just other Microsoft-proprietary formats so who cares.
Oh, about a few hundred million who use it. Sounds like you know nothing about the topic at hand. keep wasting your time with matlab (LOL!) while millions of accountants continue to get work done in excel.
I know better than to use Excel for anything that matters beyond a basic spreadsheet.
Bud, you don't have the excel skills to do anything beyond a basic spreadsheet.
Having spent time trying to fix excel worksheets for managers, I'd kill for a way to place excel sheets in source control or get a practical DIFF between versions.
I have felt the pain of being in various teams with plenty of appropriate software tools to keep everything in sync and not have a confused mess of data with muddied authority and progeny.
However, inevitably, the UI design is so crappy that people 'export to xls' and use spreadsheet offline to add little fields or discuss en-masse.
It's also a process issue. Inevitably people think too much about the contents of the fields, and another motivation for people doing xls is for them to add a column with some small teams 'little comments' about the data, but without putting it in the tool that other people could see.
Nothing like being given a list of 50 thing in an emailed spreadsheet and being asked to update status on them. Then upon manually checking the very first one and seeing that record is closed, replying 'please use the tool to have an up to date report' and then getting the reply 'just operate against the list given, I don't have 'time' to pull a new report for you'
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Being a mechanical engineering, I must disagree that we use Excel for everything. There are many types of problem that cannot be acceptably solved using Excel. As the other poster stated, there are many other computational tools that we do use, in place of Excel because of these shortcomings.
Somebody just needs to teach them how to write a program. How hard could that be?
/s
You can either:
1) pay someone to come in and gather requirements for the data collected in your financial system, and the relationships between them, and the reports desired.
2) Create a normalized database, with sanely named tables and fields, and built so that it's extensible
3) Create an application with queries, stored procedures and a secure front-end, almost certainly browser-based on top of that database, which is intuitive and allows ad-hoc querying
OR
1) You can pay 49.99 and use Excel.
The CFO has champagne taste and a beer budget. Excel has him by the balls.
I don't know where you work, but engineers using Excel should have their licenses revoked. Excel is full of bugs and easy to make, yet difficult to find mistakes for complex calculations, hence the need to get rid of Excel.
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Check his posting history. He's posted several trolls today. Help stop his trolling by modding him down.
I can't tell whether you're a troll or just seriously deranged.
He's seriously deranged. In "real" business the only time excel comes up is when some weenie manager wants a report exported into his stupid spreadsheet.
People suggesting an ERP should be shot. They're expensive failures every single time. If you don't think so, you're either a consultant selling an ERP or a dopey know-nothing manager who selected one unburdened by knowledge or consequences.
That's not to say that Excel is the right tool for every job. It's often the _only_ tool left after clueless management and incompetent IT stomp everything else to death.
The main purpose of applications like Excel, Word and Powerpoint is to generate work for themselves and those who use them. This does not mean that they are occasionally useful, but that is not their goal.
Adobe et. al. need to look at a better reporting tool then if they are having this problem. SAP only displays data, but if you want to plan and forecast and have live data, you need something to interface with it in real time. SAP has the BPC tool, or Oracle's Hyperion, or the best I've used, IBM's TM1.
Excel is a tool, and a good one. I use it all the time.
I've worked in startups, banking, mortgage, medical. If anything, people need to learn how to use it better. Most applications don't include decent reporting tools, but you can always get the data out into a CSV and put it in Excel.
A lot of people don't even know how to use pivot tables.
If you want the data to tell you something, it's pretty easy with just data dumps / pivot tables / slicers. I don't like linking to the data because Excel kind of sucks in that regard. We have some complex spreadsheets that take 20 minutes to open because some asshat linked it to about 10 different TFS queries. I've done some neat things like building tables and graphs based on an indirect field... type the name of the tab into field A1, and the tables and graphs read from that tab and update automatically. I implemented that to replace one guy who spent 5 days every month copy/pasting data into Excel. he just had no idea how to use it. My process ended up taking 10 minutes.
I once worked at one of the big mortgage companies, in a group that did quality audits of mortgages. I managed an internal dev team that built a system to do those audits, and we used SSRS for reporting. There was another internal audit team that just used Excel for a similar function. We had the cool system, and they were envious of it, but they could produce much better data, and could implement new stuff way easier than we could. I am sure could have done a lot better if it wasn't just 2 developers in a sea of luddites who had no idea what software development entailed.
I have noticed that with all of the integration with Excel and Office365, and with the fact that we use OneDrive to store things... Excel locks up and/or crashes on me quite a bit more now than it ever has. All MS Office apps, actually. So i think it's headed in the wrong direction, but hey... cloud.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Having spent time trying to fix excel worksheets for managers, I'd kill for a way to place excel sheets in source control or get a practical DIFF between versions.
Excel 2007 introduced change tracking.
SAP will fix all your problems.
With a little integration and customisation at our consultants low low hourly rate. :D
I don't know how you can write everything so wrong. You must have had a piss poor programmer because excel has FAR BETTER calculation verification than R, python, or Matlab, that can quickly show every step visually on spreadsheet so you know exactly what is happening to the numbers. Also it is extremely EASY to modify excel, that's the whole reason it's widely used. You can even record a macro and it spits out the code for you if you want to replicate a process.
Engineer using excel for everything? yuck they must have a boring, non technical job. As a Electrical engineer I would rather write a program/script that format to csv. Excel is just a middle-man for those without that knowledge. Yes it has powerful math tools in it but so does the other specialty software that I use.
I think people in the business or finance with degree make a fine use of excel: they get the raw data, run reports, then can easily give back those number, to be fed in something else. IMO that excel intended used. The issue is with people that will craft a unique excel sheet an use it for everything, slowly building a huge mess.
Sure, one could go to the IT department, get a task started, go to the governance committee and get funding and permission, and 6 months later, have an app of some sort that generates the report I need.
Or, I can pull the data into excel, fool with it for an hour or two, and get the graph that presents the data I have in the format I want. Indeed, once I've got the sheet set up, I can download this month's data, paste it into the new column (all of half a dozen numbers) and look, my graph has been updated, I can cut and paste that into my monthly status report.
Or, for a forward looking planning - I could use the institutional tool, enter possible workforce by name or job category into the tool, along with the seven pieces of metadata that someone decided would be good, then go in and hack the FTE levels down in December (because I know they'll be on vacation), but because that's an override, it takes several mouse clicks and long pull downs, etc. Do that for 15 people on various tasks over the next year and a half.
oops, there's a weird bump in monthly burn in month 6.
So, let's see what happens if I start task 3 a couple months later - in Excel, I copy and paste the cells with the workforce loading for that task and move it over 2 columns.. Ah, now my monthly burn rate is more even, and I don't have a funny bump in month 6.
Oh, I heard that someone wants to take a long vacation in August - slide the cells over, still looks like it works.
This kind of stuff, in the institutional system, which doesn't have cut/copy/paste, of course, much less "fill all the cells with the same number" requires either manually reentering all the data or exporting to excel, edit in excel, then import back from excel.
Why use a spreadsheet when you can build your own Adobe Spreadsheet from scratch using Acrobat forms. Now instead of having cells of 'dumb' data called silly things like A1 or B1, you can personalize the name of each cell like 'December2017Sales'. This way when you are building your formulas you can easily pick the cells you need from a scrolling dropdown list when in the properties window of the calculation cell.
For the people that have never used Acrobat forms designer, it is like any other tool they have.... Clunky, Horrible, Doesn't function the way it logically should, I could go on forever.
If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company.
The people at Adobe doing the financial analysis work are decidedly NOT software developers. That has a lot to do with it.
As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor. I say this as a a certified accountant and have done this sort of work professionally. Seriously, it's a lot harder than you think. People get very upset if you mess up the software that tracks the money. Replacing spreadsheets is going to be near impossible for a lot of tasks. Plus you need a tool that is flexible enough to roll with all sorts of unexpected business processes and analysis.
Despite it's many flaws, nobody has come up with a better general purpose tool for ad-hoc analysis and reporting than a spreadsheet and most finance geeks use Excel. There also is a strong whiff of "if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail". Finance people go to spreadsheets because it's the tool they already know how to use and have available. Yes sometimes there are better ways to do things but when you are asked to get the job done in some absurdly short time frame (which happens ALL the time in finance/accounting) you're going to go with what you know even if it isn't ideal. That said, Excel and other spreadsheets could do a LOT better job integrating with data sources and adapting to the real world needs of financial professionals. Frankly Microsoft (and Libreoffice) have been quite lazy in this regard. It remains an unnecessarily huge pain in the ass to pull data from outside sources into spreadsheets. And even when you can do it it is quite fragile and easy to break.
Actually if you really want to be depressed, you would be amazed at how many accountants still use paper tape calculators even when they have a spreadsheet available to them. Good luck getting those people to move to a custom designed piece of software.
Being a mechanical engineering, I must disagree that we use Excel for everything. There are many types of problem that cannot be acceptably solved using Excel. As the other poster stated, there are many other computational tools that we do use, in place of Excel because of these shortcomings.
I agree. Excel is great for simple calculations, but it falls apart quickly. Sometimes something as simple as interpolation can bring it to its knees. (if you think the "trend" formula does a proper interpolation, you're mistaken) The wheels completely fall off with anything two dimensional.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
At the last several companies in which I worked, Excel format was sometimes used in part as a "data exchange" format similar to CSV, pipe-delimited, or schema-defined XML (since even the ones such as CSV which opens just fine in Excel was "friendly enough") since individuals on the "business-side" like the ability to inspect and alter data in "a familiar application." While many of the intermediate "data inspectors" (users) had an appreciation for consistent formatting of the file, there was those that were under the indoctrination in regards to any software or data, "It just works" must apply (up to and including computer handling data with intelligence that rivals SkyNet... and "correct" automatic color choices for cell backgrounds and pie chart slices are paramount ;-)). This had led to some rather custom Excel import and export libraries and utilities (usually built upon an existing one, but there have been exceptions). Fortunately, there were those that did not mind a simple CSV or Excel file dumped from a query using the normal BI tools.
There's a trade-off to consider if your code's to be shared (ever share your Matlab code with someone who doesn't use it)
Likewise, there's a trade-off to consider if your code's to be shared (ever share your Excel code with someone who doesn't use it). Or how good is recent LibreOffice Calc at running Excel macros?
It's your employees using the hammer that is Excel to turn all their problems into nails.
They don't know any better and you don't pay your IT department enough to build the right tools for the job. Stop treating IT as an expense and treat it as the asset it is supposed to be.
It was not Microsoft Excel that was revolutionary but Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus was the real ground-breaker and all Microsoft really did was copy Lotus.
The only solution is to remove the software at the root of the "problem". Otherwise, you should not only accept but EXPECT that users will use what they have been given to the best of their abilities. You get the occasional Excel guru or Access user who will take the time to do something that fixes their problem. Those are the people who need to be promoted. Yes, I've seen these problems happen many times, particularly with Access . People make something worthwhile for their teams and then get in hot water for using a non-standard system. Well, then either remove Access globally or make the "standard" system better, but you should reward those who have used their minds to solve their own problems with the tools they are given.
Hey, I heard this company called Macromedia has a pretty nifty dev platform called Coldfusion that might help build something for that.
xD
" He is working on cutting Excel out of this process..."
This is very much like telling a crack user, "hey, you have to stop using crack!" Spreadsheets are the crack of software. Easy to start, seductive, very hard to stop.
I used to work for a company. We had a database-based financial system, and we wanted budgeting to integrate directly into the financial system, no spreadsheets! OK, but we had to customize the budgeting system to accommodate what the users wanted.
Then we had to customize it some more. Then yet more again. Eventually we thought we had it nailed, but no, the users crashed the system by exceeding the budgeting system's capabilities. Leading to yet more customization.
May takeaway? Automating the budgeting was doomed from the start. Finance kept changing the process and would never stop doing so. You cannot write database code with infinite flexibility and yet that's essentially what we had tried to do.
Spreadsheets can do this. Sometimes you have to accept that the spreadsheet is the right answer. Finance uses them to do too much IMHO, but nearly all other departments do too.
The issue isn't Excel. The issue is that executives can't articulate what questions they want to answer, so they give a vague specification of some data they'd like to see. Further, they are averse to any followup questions, because they told you exactly what they wanted.
When you pull that data from 3 different and completely un-integrated sources and put it in Excel and make your graphs all pretty and whatnot, the response you get from the executives is that it doesn't tell the right story or still doesn't answer their (still unarticulated) question. And can the columns be blue? The official corporate color scheme is red but we like blue.
This is just reality. Everybody who does reporting has to deal with these complaints.
Did this once to use excel to view real time data. It just required connecting to the database with an excel ODBC Driver, The tool worked fine until IT upgraded the server and remove the server side OBDC driver for security reasons.
And the reason is that about once a week a problem arises that Excel can solve quickly, but no other readily available software can solve. Each of my problems is different from the others. A very few are maintained with fresh information from time to time.
The problem for this finance chief is that he is doing the same process repeatedly. Passing data from this system to that and massaging it repeatedly. A basic motto of procedures is that you never do them twice. You can write software or scripts or macros to perform all future iterations of the process.
Most corporate data management is repetitive and should not be touched by humans who will surely mess it up.
...omphaloskepsis often...
For years, I worked at a pharmaceutical manufacturing company that had horrific complex processes to extract financial data from transactional systems and transport it to the analysts and planners who were doing their work in Excel. It took years, but we eventually connected the transactional systems to a data visualization environment (it required a huge amount of work to align, cleanse, and synchronize the data from the disparate sources). The data viz environment both supported "canned" (i.e. IT-developed) and end-user-developed visualizations, all of which changed dynamically as the underlying data itself changed. Structural changes in the source systems were made invisible to the data viz packages through automated ETLs, which were maintained behind the scenes.
The whole concept of pivot tables in Excel disappeared. All of the errors derived from stale data disappeared. All of the mis-copied functions (with mis-aligned absolute & relative references) disappeared.
Then, all of the maintenance was outsourced, and the company-employed IT people got laid off. Go figure.
They're not my friends, and I get to laugh at them when their macro crash their unsaved excel.
The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. It's definitely a more nuanced subject than this article (and most of the comments) suggest. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets:
It is a spreadsheet program, not magic. A fucking spreadsheet. Get over it.
I love Excel spreadsheets: When I get one, I convert to .csv and scp to my *nix boxen so I can work the data with GNU tools. All of my spreadsheet input is the reverse of that process.
What else are you realistically going to use? The other options are total shit. You CAN expect MBA-oriented/Accounting-oriented/Finance-oriented people to become expert or often even amateur programmers. You likely can't justify hiring programmers to team with them - this DOES NOT work with STEM which has higher operating margins are businesses.
This is just silly!
What's the shared drive system they are using? I need one, but over the internet. I have a couple of computers connected to a local server where the files are stored, thus the files are locked if someone else is using it and this keeps the files always to the latest version (to everyone).
But taking this over the internet, I can't seem to find anything, Nextcloud needs syncing and makes editing a mess, edits are late, not everyone has the latest files, etc. So, I'm wondering what system do they use. (Also tried WebDAV too, and it has the same problems, pain to upload-download files every time they are opened, etc).
I think that I'm asking something impossible and nothing beats the local network, at least when talking about a centralized server to keep the files.
Just in case: I'm not joking.
Thanks
Excel offers Privacy to Accountants which Adobe CFO is loathing.
Casteism
"Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s"
That's BS. Ever hear of Visicalc or MultiPlan?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
While excel is a great tool, to which I use all the time, I am a bit horrified of all the stories it its use.
The problem with excel is mostly it tries to be "helpful" and most users who use it don't really know how to use it.
I've seen tons of problems with data being transferred between database systems gets lost in translation usually because of data type issues...
Recognizable enough that I can tell someone somewhere down the line imported into excel to make a correction or something, exporting it again...
Watched Godfather II last night.... "...be a shame if something were to happen to all your leading zeros..." for example.
Having written just a simple customer billing program for a customer service department, I'm well aware of this. Corporate customers billed by the month, by the minute, N free calls per month before billing at X rate, free first 10 minutes of support, all support summed up and billed by the hour....it was a fucking nightmare. But prior to that, all the CS staff were just logging it in Excel, and sending it to the manager to sum up each month.New manager took one look at that process, shit their pants, and called IT in to create a solution.
Sounds familiar. I've seen ad-hoc "solutions" like that far too often. (I'm both an industrial engineer and a certified accountant so I get to fix stuff like that routinely) My latest employer had a system where they would take trial balances out of their accounting system, do a bunch of manual calculation on paper tape calculators, enter some number, see what was still wrong and repeat the process for 4-5 days until the books balanced. As a stop gap I made their spreadsheets talk directly to the database via ODBC and with an overly complicated spreadsheet got the books to close in 45 minutes. Eventually we moved to a proper accounting system but they had been doing that ridiculous process for 20 years.
Classic example of people using Excel for tasks which it technically can do but for which it is poorly suited. I don't think most IT folks really appreciate just how much finance/accounting people use Excel to solve every problem they run into even when doing so isn't actually a good idea.
You have my sincere condolences.
Ha! Thanks but no need. Most of the problems I deal with are not so bad and I enjoy what I do. I make a decent and steady living fixing problems of people who get way too comfortable doing something a certain way without ever questioning whether there is a better approach. The biggest challenge is usually getting them to spend just a little money now for a big payback in time savings. Successful small business owners tend to be rather tight fisted with cash even when it hurts them. It's a good impulse to be careful with cash but it's easy to take it too far. I actually had a customer once ask me to make a ROI presentation to justify a $400 laser printer to replace a bunch of inkjets. (FYI it paid for itself after the first toner cartridges) I make a living saying "did you know you could..." and then finishing the sentence. I get a paycheck and an endless stream of (usually) interesting problems to fix and that makes my inner engineer happy.
Same company I mentioned also had been leasing a number of pieces of tooling since 1985 (no joke) and had paid for the tooling probably at least 5 times over. Saved them a decent amount of cash each month with a ROI of around a year. Now they own all their tooling and aren't needlessly bleeding cash. But it took me about two years to convince them that spending a bit now to buy it out would be worth it. Stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel...