[datadeft]

The amount of issues I have seen in the last ~20 years caused by "off by one" type of errors in Excel is insane.

Few examples:

- incorrect schedule for the electricity grid for an entire country

- incorrect assessment of an airport use for an airline (causing few millions USD loss in revenue)

- incorrect financial position assessment for a mine (resulting incorrect deciosion to optimize the wrong business process, not sure about how much they lost)

Making illegal states unrepresentable is a concept that benefits programming langues and business processes alike.

[dereg]

You’re only looking at one side of it. Consider how much value that excel adds, and how many use cases it enables. It’s incalculable. It’s always easy to poke at excel’s issues, but errors are almost always a skill issue.

From a financial perspective, there are many ways you could enforce checks to ensure the model is balanced - it just takes time. Data entry can be an issue, but you can automate that too. The deloitte report is saying the health department should benefit from adopting a gigantic erp system but you could get 90% of the benefit by employing a couple people that really know what they’re doing.

You could say that excel should allow those things to happen but the flexibility is precisely what makes it so valuable.

The people writing the reports are consultants. Consultants recommend things that benefit consultants. In their case, a multi year process and tens of millions of dollars trying to install ERP software is more a windfall for the vendors and not the companies.

[ericd]

Absolutely, kudos to them for following KISS, despite the legions of people who have probably told them they’re doing it wrong.

[7thaccount]

Yep. I was going to say the same thing. Installing some $10M+ software costs the company more than just the install and ongoing licensing costs. You have to have an entire new IT team to manage it and staff to understand and so on. There are probably just as many chances of having a big issue.

[threatofrain]

That assumes that Better Excel would somehow not look like Excel and would lose its benefits of being easy. My assumption is that Better Excel will still look like Excel, in the same way that Better iOS will also look like iOS.

[edude03]

> but errors are almost always a skill issue

Sure but to compare it to tech, this is why we build tooling like linters and typed languages so that we don’t lose millions of dollars because we needed the average developer to implement a feature. I imagine in heath care it’s even more skewed because a SW eng can see the compiler output and make changes but the person entering the data isn’t (for example) the nurse that’s using the needles to be accounted for

[tomatocracy]

There are indeed tools like this available for Excel. And there are also whole practices within the big accountancy firms, and independent firms which focus on providing "audit" of Excel files like this, which are used commonly where there are financial firms involved in a project with big money at stake (lenders, financial investors, etc). But in my experience these tools and services aren't often used for the spreadsheets which are used for day to day corporate-type management (I would count government as part of that).

[potato3732842]

Say nothing of many crisis were avoided because somebody was able to pull up a local excel file despite a central service being down or go through their historical files and sniff out a discrepancy. Workflows like that are often impossible or require coordinating with a vendor in another time zone or a bunch of slow cross team communication and ticket submissions with the sort of minimum effort "we'll run a DB in the cloud and slap a JS front end built with a bunch of questionable but flashy libraries and ignore all the edge cases because I'll be working somewhere else in 2yr" solutions that the median software developer hive mind will implement if left to its own devices.

[whiplash451]

Do you have evidence that _any_ other software would not be prone to this kind of errors, taking into account the fact that at the scale of dozens of billions of dollars, the numbers you mentioned seem like rounding errors (except for the first one which would deserve a reference)?

[pjc50]

Don't forget Reinhart-Rogoff, which ties into the other thread on academic fraud/nonreproduction, and arguably did huge amounts of economic damage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190

[jessekv]

IMO unit tests are roughly the software equivalent of double-entry bookkeeping.

[jbaber]

This is a very good analogy. I will steal it.

[Suppafly]

>The amount of issues I have seen in the last ~20 years caused by "off by one" type of errors in Excel is insane.

Generally those aren't a fault of excel, but a fault of someone doing something dumb in excel. People do dumb stuff in every problem and it's nearly impossible to prevent it.

[rco8786]

Imagine how many errors occurred before we had digital spreadsheet technology.

That said, I’ve always thought there was a product that sits somewhere in between Excel and full blown custom software that provides some of the controls we need while still being and build able by someone with low/average technical skills

[netsharc]

FileMaker seems to cover this (admittedly my interactions with it was in high school, which was last millennium), it's a database app but there's a lot of "make your own UI" parts in it, so you can create custom UIs (and wizards) for your use cases.

I suppose MS Access offers this too, although FM feels more user-friendly, MS Access felt like Internet Explorer 4, where an error dialog would pop-up for every little JavaScript error (disclaimer: this opinion is from 25 years ago).

[rco8786]

No you're right on the money in my opinion. I have very fond memories of spinning up apps in MS Access that were quick and dirty but extremely powerful, and able to be maintained/modified by folks that were not professionally trained software engineers. I think there's a missing area in the market for something exactly like that again.

[rrr_oh_man]

The hive mind really hated (hates?) MS Access and I don't know why.

I built a mini ERP for my father's company when I was 16. Started out as an excel spreadsheet, but then added inventory, accounting, and printing contracts and reports.

He kept using it until retirement and was very happy with it. I could learn & apply SQL. Win-win.

[TMWNN]

I've done that over the last several years, building an order-tracking/accounting system for myself in Excel. (Inventory and fulfillment is handled by commercial software.) I'm mulling over whether to move to a "real" database.

I'm on a Mac so can't move to Access. I've thought about FileMaker, but am considering Panorama X because unlike FileMaker it reportedly allows undoing almost anything, while FileMaker is like the typical database in a record commit not being undoable.

(Yes, I know that not allowing such is good practice, which is why I am not a database admin.)

I've heard good things about Panorama X, and it has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost or conversion time, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?

[rrr_oh_man]

These days I default to Google Sheets for almost anything.

App Script is quite powerful and easier to write and understand than VBA imho.

[laxmin]

Filemaker is great. We created a monster at our University to keep track of Research Grants and it worked for almost 20 years flawlessly.

Untill, a consultant replaced it with an 'enterprise' solution that cost 10000x more to run and maintain.

Sometimes, well designed systems, however simple they might be, would be all that is required.

[masfuerte]

I've not used it, but I thought Airtable occupied this spot. It seems to have a few open-source clones if you want to run it locally. I don't know if they are any good.

[tomatocracy]

Microsoft also has Power BI which occupies this "database which looks like a spreadsheet" space. But it's not well known.