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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.
Because nobody understands how Access works (meaning regular office people). The amazement when you show them how a report they would spent a week generating in Excel takes less than a second in Access is palpable. There are better databases, but for people who are using Excel as a database they probably already have Access installed and ready to go. It's not bad for small databases.
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.
Hear, hear. When someone who knows what they're doing can create a functional workflow prototype in an evening using a spreadsheet, yet having a working application with the same or less functionality requires months of taking requirements and development iterations, it's no wonder that people use the tools at hand for most of their information, even if developers think that doing this is a monstrosity.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Worked at a company several years ago that produced and sold printers and scanners. They once asked in genral why their scanning system for larger companies was not selling.
I asked them if it was any good. If the hardware was good. If it worked. If it was flexible and I got the whole sales pitch of how great it was, Then I asked if it was so good, why are WE not using it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.