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.

Comments

Excel is separated from other systems

[Osgeld]

well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem

Re:Excel is separated from other systems

[jellomizer]

When you have Excel or Access creep in your organization, it is often because of stupid IT policies, where you don't have enough IT Staff to make good solutions, or IT rules are so strict that the staff isn't allowed to make such a solution.

Re:Excel is separated from other systems

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem

Quoted for truth. The Excel plus copious macros and hackjob Access monstrosities of the world are terrible, terrible, things; but they exist because Office is actually pretty good at letting people who have subject matter expertise and subject matter problems bang out something resembling a solution without much IT or software engineering getting involved. This is also one of the reasons why Office has been so persistent.

You can(and taste dictates that you should) dislike the results; they are usually awful; but those sorts of systems grow up when people are forced to build their own tools because yours are nonexistent and/or so atrocious as to be effectively unusable. If you don't build it; your users will be forced to, and while they may do a decent job given the constraints of their tools and knowledge, it won't be pretty or maintainable.

Re:Excel is separated from other systems

[wonkavader]

No. You're doing it wrong.

A database
is hard to do
That means that it's
expensive too
Burma Shave.

Or to fix the content...

Already have
a database
why is Excel
all over the place?
Burma Shave

Or

One data team
in fertile soils
could wipe you clean
of spreadsheet boils
Burma Shave

Re:Excel is separated from other systems

[CohibaVancouver]

Too bad they're not a software company. If they were, they could probably have someone code up a new system to automate this.

It's a classic problem referenced for centuries as "The cobbler's children have no shoes." If you're a software company your developers are seen as a resource to develop code that you sell for revenue, not code up internal systems. You also don't want to pay another software company to solve your problem because you might either a) compete with them or b) think you should do it internally (even though you can't or won't).

It's not unique to software. I once worked for a mechanic shop that had a handful of company cars that were in terrible shape. Same deal. The boss never wanted his mechanics to work on the company fleet, but he sure as heck wasn't going to pay a competing mechanical shop to work on them either.

Re: Excel is separated from other systems

[ShanghaiBill]

Then they should hire a DBA, problem solved

Adobe has DBAs. The problem is not solved.

If an accountant needs to extract values from a column of data using a certain criteria these are the alternatives:

1. Write an Excel macro. Elapsed time: 5 minutes.

2. Go talk to the DBA. The DBA declines the request, and tells the accountant to go through his manager. The accountant then schedules a meeting with his manager for next Tuesday to discuss the issue. The meeting lasts 40 minutes, and the manager approves the request. The request is then written up as a formal spec, taking about a hour. The spec is then forwarded to the DBA's manager, and sits in her inbox. After a week, the accountant checks on the status, and finds out that no one is working on his request, and asks the DBA's manager to forward the request. The request is finally forwarded to the DBA, where it is placed at the back of his work queue. Finally, after two months, the accountant has his request ... except is isn't actually what he needed because the DBA implemented what the spec said rather than what it was meant to say. The frustrated accountant then extracts the entire DB into an Excel file and writes a macro in 5 minutes.

Stop using Excel? DOUBLE DOWN on it.

[Bright Apollo]

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.

--#

We discussed this back in 2005

[Provocateur]

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....