I think the joke is twofold. First of all, Microsoft pretty much has a monopoly on financial software with their excel, which shows that the entire global finances are in the hands of that crab.
The second joke, must be that they never bother updating the suite to the latest, and solely depend on 2013🤷
For certain values of “works”. I also think the learning curve is part of the issue. You end up doing stuff Excel has no business handling but is there due to the absurd scope-creep.
Not just financial documentation, but everything. Planning staff levels, work assignments, quarterly reports, bonus calculations, pto administration, and more. There’s likely people retiring that wrote an excel macro 20 years ago that still part of a critical business process.
I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.
At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.
There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.
Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.
I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.
Some number of years ago, I was an intern within a department of state government. I was tasked with helping to enrich their databases. So they sent over an Excel file. I did my thing and added new columns, then I had to send it back over to someone within each division so they could do the data entry. To my horror, when I went to visit one of the division heads, I saw their admin sitting at a computer with a printout of my changes sitting on a document holder next to the screen…manually typing geographic coordinates into a data entry form.
True, I work in ecomm and we definitely have database exports being passed around relatively freely. No passwords obviously, but segmentation data, emails, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
We have good IT security but it still doesn’t feel great.
My company used Google for a few years. Higher level Excel users hated Sheets and didn’t give up Excel. But for the rest of us riffraff Sheets was great. The collaboration features work really well, better than Office 360.
I’m one of the Excel guys, I live by tables, PowerQuery, VBA/UDFs, and loading data from APIs and SQL databases. If any of that functionality lives in Sheets I’ve never been able to figure it out productively.
My last contract used Sheets and I felt like a toddler, it’s too different for my tastes.
Having worked for a state government which maintained data for federal submissions in 15 different versions of the same giant excel file on 15 different computers, it’s scary how accurate this is.
I’ve worked at private companies where this is the case too lol.
This is true even when better software would work instead of the one-size-fits-all-but-isn’t-suitable Excel.
Often to get it to work the way I want is through VBA scripting. And at that point I should be using other software but companies are cheap and don’t want to invest in better tech.
Same here. Usually office 2007 + saveaspdf plugin + local language pack is my way to go, but recently started using only office and Im amazed how compatible it is, at least for my usage.
I work in Data centers. A few years back I saw a banking customer with a mainframe computer in their hall while we were upgrading the buildings cooling systems.
I’m trying to move away and doing all I can with python (pandas, numpy and friends). Everything starts with a pd.read_excel() and finish with a df.to_excel().
I’ve worked for a massive corporation in which they had 300mb+ excel files they bought high specs computers just to have them load fast enough and searching would take 3 to 5 minutes we suggested that they’d try moving it to Microsoft access and the query became instant, I can’t imagine the hours wasted waiting for the queries to run
The data fits on the screen. Roughly 40x30 matrices are fine. These rules aren’t set in stone, so there are situations when it’s still justified to use matrices larger than that.
You can see all the sheets you need. Roughly 10-14 sheets. If you need more sheets than that, you should probably split the calculation into several files.
You need complicated VBA macros and you need them to run perfectly every time. In my experience, this programming language is infuriatingly unpredictable and unreliable. Random things happen all the time and no amount of debugging is able to solve these types of cosmic problems.
You can go beyond those general guidelines, but using everything gets more and more annoying the further you go. Pretty soon you’ll realize it would have been better to build the whole thing in Python, R or something else. Once the file size hits 15 MB you know you’ve gone way too far and it’s about time you rebuilt the whole calculation using some nicer tool. I try to switch as soon as possible when I realize my calculations are about to grow beyond these limits.
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