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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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"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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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.
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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
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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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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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.
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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.
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