Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown Ireland's Diarmuid Early has won the Excel World Championship. Readers of a certain age may be disappointed to learn he has never used Lotus 1-2-3. Early beat Andrew Ngai of Australia, in a Las Vegas final livestreamed by ESPN. The show was vaguely reminiscent of a wrestling event, with a half-time show featuring an "Export to …
But you have to think that if his Excel skills are represented by mount Everest, then the average Excel power user's skills would be a small molehill and the average office worker's skills a grain of sand.
In the right hands and for the right use case, a great tool. For the vast majority of use cases, a dangerous weapon in the hands of a small child.
I’m not sure it is the wrong reason to use Excel as a simple database (if it really is simple). What alternative is there that is nearly as approachable?
(I think a simpler or more modern Access (Paradox?) tool is sadly lacking to bridge the gap between Excel and SQL Server.)
Setting up a database (as opposed to a list) is understanding the structure of the data to go into it. Perhaps a simpler application would let the user start typing in what they though of as records, start storing them but also analysing them and reorganising them to recognise the structure and restructure the data store accordingly.
For instance if it were presented with a list of things sold, including or der details, it might work out quickly that that there were two entities, an order and an item and not much less quickly that the "item" wasn't a single structure but included a product and likewise the "order" included a customer. The restructuring hat involved mightn't be too onerous as it would quickly work that out with a one to many relationship between order and item, between product and item and between customer and order. It might take rather longer to discover customers could have multiple delivery addresses and that they might not correspond to billing address and even longer to discover that product priced could change and the restructuring of the data might freeze it for a while..
As a young teenager we were all taught to make explosives in the school chemistry lessons in Rugby, after a few bangs we all were a lot more careful children with no more bangs in the class again. An environment where kids learn that seems to never exist with all politicians.
I also had a physics teacher who had lost a couple of ends of fingers as a teenager making his own fireworks. He taught us how to build firebombs and also took on out to the field and let off a banger that knocked us off our feet at 40 meters. As for the tray of petrol and the bucket of water on the long jump pit the less said the better. He retired after we did our Physics GCSE because he refused to teach combined science.
And I am the mole under the hills digging around the data tunnels usually with powershell. 'cause there I am not restricted to 2D sheets glued together by commands different in every language (dammit, where is the "English formula" button in Excel? LO-calc has it!).
So many multinationals still rely on Excel for key tasks, it is scary.
Coming from Visicalc/Multiplan, then Lotus 1,2,3, Excel and Quattro Pro, I still always check key values with my trusted HP15C and HP12C.
Excel is a great tool, and there is a fantastic multigenerational community available to help.
20/20?
I don't even remember what it ran on (Presumably either DOS or VAX VMS, as that's mostly what my company used back in 1994)
I just remember my boss getting a severe bollocking when the bean counters realised he'd shelled out big bucks for a 10 year support contract for it.
(Edit: A quick Google shows it was VAX)
I still remember from back in the days when the office wars were a thing and I had a user call the Helpdesk asking why the spellcheck was not working on the database in their spreadsheet. That got printed, laminated and put on the wall as a warning to all Helpdesk staff that there was no depth users would not stoop to
I have posted this link before: Rob Easterway's 2019 talk to the Royal Institution. He postulates that many (most?) spreadsheets are wrong. I have certainly come across many. He'd found the information on the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group "Horror Stories" section.
Think of the poor sods who have been laid off in an organization because a distant bean-counter's main work tool indicated "too expensive".
Fairly sure I saw a report of the spreadsheet used by one G. Osborne and his pals to justify the austerity program. Apparently an error found two years later, when corrected, showed the cuts were not necessary. The estimate of additional deaths attributed to those policies is >300,000. Oops.
Where i work we generally use python or R for time-series based data analysis. Someone in another team asked for our source data in CSV form, which we gladly provided. A little while later they came back unable to analyse the file - it was 10 or so million rows of data. They were baffled that everyone wasn’t using Excel before this but less surprised afterwards.
Excel is fine in the right hands used for the right things. Unfortunately it is seldom the case either of those caveats are met.
A former boss, an experienced coder, working at home under some time pressure, wrote his own discounted cash flow model.
Finance dept rejected it because for the same inputs, their model gave different results. Guess whose was correct, the hastily thrown together one or the one the bean counters had been using for a few years to assess multi million $ projects?
Good coders test, bean counters consider themselves infallible.
We took the opportunity to seek out spreadsheet models in use created by non IT end users. Often written by someone who'd moved on, of course zero documentation and sometimes pretty complex. Most of those got scrapped
It turned out most usage of excel was as a substitute for a pocket calculator or for keeping pretty simple lists.
The learning point from the exercise was that non-tech users have a lot of potential needs that IT could address with a few days or hours work but access to the right level of expertise was difficult. IT teams were focussed on the big prestige projects involving man-years of effort, no route for small tasks that could deliver worthwhile benefit for little effort. It was those tasks that a smart end-user could identify as a benefit but, without access to an appropriate IT guy, might try a DIY approach.
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