It’s just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don’t understand anything.
Is it powerful? Yes
Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
Are the “powerful” features intuitive to new users? Also no.
Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
Surely its not any harder than teaching them basic SQL.
I guess it depends on what you define as “basic SQL”. Because most people are already used to working with desktop apps, and familiar with the office programs specifically.
You’d essentially have to teach them programming. Its like when people say “terminal is better than GUI” (it’s me, I say that) but then you forget about all of the people who don’t know the difference between a desktop and a modem
It wouldn’t be hard to teach them a graphical representation of SQL, something like Access I guess. Teach them concepts like joins and where clauses, and give them software that abstracts that a bit.
Then add some Excel-like features on top. Everything would end up being SQL at the end of the day, and sysadmins could then tune things to keep them fast (e.g. replicate DBs so poorly optimized queries don’t hurt the whole org, esp. if a dept only needs read access).
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.
You’re r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.
Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.
Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it’ll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.
It’s a powerful tool that you shouldn’t use as a book keeping tool and ledger for a company that manages $16B. And I’ve worked on a trading floor of a big energy company. Excel was only used within departments as a tool for the employees not as the entire companies financial administration.
Excel is a fantastic tool. It is however not a database.
Excel is a powerful tool.
You typoed ‘popular’?
It’s not… Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ), limits in columns and records, ever changing formats across versions… You asking for a disaster to happen which happens very often
Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers )
You can literally label ranges to use them as variables in Excel formulae, not to mention Excel Tables has more operations and features than you’ll ever need.
limits in columns and records
Unless you are working with an unfiltered, un-aggregated ledger dump straight out of your database (in which case you shouldn’t be let anywhere near an office computer), it’s rather hard to cross 1M+ rows and 16.4k columns in corporate finance.
ever changing formats across versions
The .xlsx format was introduced in 2007 (18 years ago) and hasn’t changed since. Not to mention you can still use all kinds of plaintext formats whenever you want.
Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it :-) About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?
Would you like this in excel formula, VBA, or python?
It can be done in all. You’re only proving the other poster’s point. Excel isn’t necessarily the best option for tech literate people but given the tech illiteracy of many offices, it isn’t surprising they use excel for stuff like this.
Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it :-)
I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.
About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?
=OFFSET(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell.Such a weird argument that you’ve responding to, as the answer (as you provided) is so easy and well known.
Just goes to show that a spreadsheet is a very powerful tool.🤣
You could run empires on the back of a spreadsheet.
You absolutely shouldn’t, it’s nearly the worst option you have available, but you could.
It’s not the worst option available, it might not be the cleanest solution, but it does offer a level of flexibility if you have an in-depth understanding of key operational (or financial) business processes.
Shift+F9… annnnd, the data is gone
Not if there is a BACKUP folder with daily copies of all your spreadsheets.
Sifting through the backups is so much fun when you’re trying to find when a particular issue started.
Excel is indeed super powerful. I’ve seen firsthand what they power in multiple Fortune 500 companies, and usually for a lot of critical tasks. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that this company was using it for finances.
My backup is ctrl+z 😎
It’s better than just text files or word I guess
This is why I specified “nearly” the worst. It can absolutely get the job done and has basically every tool you’d need to do the job, but it’s pretty much the worst amongst the “this will do everything you need” options.
My thought process was abacus < pen & paper < text file < spreadsheet < database solutions
But a spreadsheet can function like a database. 🤣
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Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
Lol my company has a “no sort” policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.
Can you not export to excel? Tbh Im new to it and it is so all encompassing I am basically lurking around outside
You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it’ll kill almost all the useful information. We’ve got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It’s an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
Oh god, my training has been trial and error
Surely it would be cheaper to hire a dev for 6 months to put it into a proper database.
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Even if their spending is that simple in terms of categories, it’s almost certain their breakdown within each category is definitely quite a bit more complex. Hell, my wife runs her own therapy practice with just herself and she talks about how obnoxious dealing with insurance is for billing all the time.
Yeah, it depends entirely on how many things you’re tracking and how many people need to access it. It’s probably not the right tool here, but sometimes it just is.
Using it to share data can be a nightmare, especially since different departments might look at that data in various ways and want their own formats. I work for a Fortune 500 company that, at least at my level of management, emailing around attached full spreadsheets of daily data rather than have a centralized database. I’ve fought it for years, but it’s what the higher ups want…stupid.
Even better when Microsoft puts out improvements like 365 and OneDrive that break certain functions, then depreciates Excel itself. God I hate the cloud.
Excel isn’t a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable ‘features’ (can’t even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I’m not the only person on the company.
Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn’t work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I’ll have to keep this in mind.
Once you get the basics of Python, you need to learn the Pandas library. Also, check out Jupyter notebooks right now, is going to make your life easier.
