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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
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.
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.
The problem is that it isn't just (or primarily) with ad hoc and custom analyses.
It is that regular business functions are run with these sheets all the time. Business types do this because the are familiar with the tool, and they can implement the process themselves without calling in a dev team.
And all of this is perfectly understandable. Would you call in an outside dev team, explain requirements, and then have to wait for an acceptable product to be produced, when you could do it yourself quickly?
This is inevitable unless considerable effort is expended by the organization to identify and pull these business functions into formal, administered, monitored systems.
A decree not to use Excel at all (if this is what it is) is stupid.
The emphasis should be on educating the business on treating these "normal function" spreadsheets as prototypes of the function that must be implemented formally going forward, and the necessary resources must be provided to make this happen, and suitable reward structures must exist to encourage businessmen to identify and bring forward these functions for proper automation. Without all of this this decree will be useless.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Also, stop using Acrobat Reader.
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.
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.
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.
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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And all of this is perfectly understandable. Would you call in an outside dev team, explain requirements, and then have to wait for an acceptable product to be produced, when you could do it yourself quickly? This is inevitable unless considerable effort is expended by the organization to identify and pull these business functions into formal, administered, monitored systems.
Also important is that once it's moved outside Excel they often lose transparancy and flexiblity. They can't step-by-step it through the cells, they can't easily simulate it on a set of test data, they can't try tweaking a formula and see how it turns out unless somebody did a lot of work to enable that. Getting the initial version out of Excel is only half the fun, it's making the result maintainable that's the challenge. We experienced somewhat the same here migrating from SPSS syntax to SQL, people that used to be very hands-on suddenly felt it was a black box they didn't really understand and couldn't trace through the process.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
R, Python, ... if you want to spend money, SAS, SPSS etc
There are plenty of data packages out there for data analysis, the problem is that very few people know how to use it well. I'm going trhough the same problem with science data, scientists doing ANOVA and regression analysis in Excel files with 20k+ rows and 20k+ columns. Then at some point, even Excel will no longer do and then they wonder what to do, usually right in the middle of some critical time.
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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.
Somebody just needs to teach them how to write a program. How hard could that be?
/s
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
You know you can name cells in Excel too and use those names in formulas?
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
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.
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...
You hit on one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that, in many companies, the data which Excel is used to analyze is a moving target. What I mean is that there are a lot of business side people who massage the data in Excel in order to identify what is causing a particular problem. Shortly after they have finished tweaking the Excel spreadsheets to tell them how to track the problem, they have fixed that problem and now have another problem, which is analyzed from the same data set (or one similar enough to start tweaking from what you ended up with on the last problem), which requires sorting the same data in a completely different way..
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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:
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...