[fivea]

> Spreadsheets are better because as you say the owner is their job to maintain it. If you replace with an IT process the new "owner" is likely a below-average developer that probably is uninterested in the business.

I disagree. Spreadsheets are incomparably worse because what you charitably described as "the owner is their job to maintain it" in real life it's reflected as having a single employee who abused a first-move advantage to monopolize and excerpt unduly control over, and even hijack, key operation areas.

We all heard horror stories of how employees screwed over their former bosses because only they had control over things like key spreadsheets. Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

[cgio]

I have heard these horror stories so many times but never witnessed them in reality. From my point of view, excel is a great way to ensure knowledge is not hidden, as you have a file format that embeds calculations, data and outputs. It can be ugly, but nothing that a seasoned excel warrior cannot parse and there’s plenty of them around. Now if someone as an employer does not even have copies of the files, they have bigger problems than Excel itself.

The other horror stories of errors in spreadsheets, them yes I have witnessed them regularly.

[crispyambulance]

> Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

Spreadsheets will exist regardless of what developers think of them. Ironically, that's a good thing.

Many projects that put food on dev's tables started out as out-of-control Excel monstrosities that were created and operated for long spans of time by well-meaning and productive folks. They start as simple manual spreadsheets with some formulas and then evolve into much more involved beasts. Work gets done and it's all nicely contained in somebody's cube and they look good and can be rightfully proud of their accomplishment.

Things just get done. For a while. Sometimes a LONG while. Until the bitter realities that software developers have learned to deal with over the decades start to seep into these projects and drown the unwitting folks who created them, slowly but surely, like an ever-increasing number of small holes in the bottom of boat. That's when things break or become unmanageable and that's when developers start getting engaged-- assuming these excel masterpieces have actually become mission-critical.

There's a guy at work that operates one of these excel monstrosities. It's been going for ~7 years now. It's a monster excel spreadsheet that, among an ever-growing list of things, does dubious probabilistic forecasting of future PO's based on shit ripped from salesforce (not even using the api). He has a dedicated laptop behind him pulling in data from multiple sources, like clockwork, and has recently started making attractive Power-BI dashboards using his excel worksheets as the data sources. And you know what? He looks GOOD to the people that matter. Does the forecasting actually work? Not really, but being so immersed in all that data has made him knowledgeable about many details of the operation. He's able to keep track of costs and stay on top of things. It doesn't matter (to him) that the whole thing will vaporize when he leaves, or that he could tire of it and just foist it upon some hapless supply-chain person who's just learned to use formulas in excel.

[listenallyall]

Most forecasting doesn't really work, as in, most falls between "not useful for predicting the future" and "outright wrong." You could get your forecasts for free or you could pay millions of dollars, pretty much same result. Not an Excel thing in any way.

[crispyambulance]

Indeed, the spreadsheet I am thinking is particularly hot garbage, but slap some dorky corporate bar-charts on there and it's like beer-googles for suits.

[listenallyall]

But why are you associating that with Excel? Every analytics tool features charts front and center regardless of how it is delivered, web, BI, dashboard, Jupyter, etc, and no matter what language it is written in (R: ggplot, Py: matplotlib, JS: highcharts etc.).

The guy's spreadsheet seems to work. He's delivering what his bosses want to see. You might have an issue with the final output but they apparently don't. What exactly is the problem you think you can fix?

[crispyambulance]

I am not trying to fix anything.

I am on the side of excel being used like this, even if it's hot-garbage. The worst that can happen is that it collapses upon itself and then others need to come in and do it right, or migrate the thing to something else entirely.