[thesuitonym]

Another oft overlooked point is that anti-spreadsheet people aren't actually against using spreadsheets, we just want our coworkers to stop placing mission critical operations in an enormous, half-baked spreadsheet that exists only in some long-since retired users home directory.

[gregates]

As someone who has been to multiple trade shows to show off our own spreadsheet product that solves some of these problems (https://rowzero.io/home), I can tell you there are a bunch of data engineers and their managers who have a visceral hatred of spreadsheets but have trouble articulating any reason for it.

[immibis]

Feels a bit like the no-code paradox though. When you make a sufficiently advanced no-code (or no-database) tool it becomes equivalent to code (or a database) and even though it does entice a novice to start using it, a complex system made in it is still complex code (or a complex database) and ends up requiring a competent programmer (or db admin) to maintain it, who wishes it was written the normal way to begin with.

[gregates]

I have no doubt that the stories of complex spreadsheet models as the beating heart of a business are true. But those models are likely the sole survivor from a thousand dead and gone spreadsheets that people extracted value from for a time, but just didn't have the ongoing utility or wide enough audience to merit being turned into a dashboard or web app. It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

In other words, one of the core use cases for a spreadsheet is that it empowers a broad swathe of users (broader than Tableau or PowerBI) to quickly extract insights from their data to fill immediate needs.

Or at least, that's a core use case if you can get your data into a spreadsheet without too much trouble.

[bobson381]

And then the attached part of this that you mentioned is that the cursed survivors have essentially outcompeted their peers for survival. They're winners of a genetic algorithm whose basis is company data. They have close contact with actual reality, and have been beaten carefully into shape by it. I have kind of a grudging respect for these because of that, actually.

[encloser]

> It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or desire to improve it to be more reliable and maintainable.

At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that maybe we should invest more into this critical business process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.

[Terr_]

> but have trouble articulating

I imagine that's because it's not really a technical problem, but an issue with how the whole organization (mis)handles complexity, and we collectively [1] still struggle to model/name a lot of those problems.

[1] Yeah yeah, I see you there in the back, you excited cyberneticist bubbling with enthusiasm to share... but I mean as a practical widespread matter.

[citizenpaul]

I've always suspected if someone were to make a spreadsheet app that solves most spreadsheet problems it would collapse most companies.

As I see it the limitations of spreadsheets are what keep them from becoming the official way of doing things. At some point most of the stuff in the spreadsheets has data provenance in a properly managed IT system somewhere. If companies could get rid of this part of IT they would suddenly find themselves in a trillion dollar pit of lost money/inventory, As the spreadsheet mess spiraled out of control with no source of truth.

[rictic]

I love spreadsheets for casual stuff, but my concerns with using them for anything heavy duty are twofold: change management and correctness testing.

Other software that I use and write is version controlled and has tests to catch errors, mistakes, typos. Those tests regularly find and prevent problems! Likewise version control.

Could we get the same with spreadsheets? Seems difficult but not conceptually impossible, particularly with LLM assistance.

[giancarlostoro]

Imagine if people used Emacs the way they use Spreadsheets. "Hey I made a way to simplify our workflow, it has forms, buttons, gizmos we need" then you go to their desk, and its some custom Elisp abomination. I have to imagine this is how most people who hate spreadsheets see them. It still works, but it's a quirky solution.

Also I remember Row Zero the demo on your home page was impressive. You guys were S3 engineers too, good to know your project took off. :)

[goostavos]

One of the surprising things about working inside of $MegaCorp is that if you knock on enough doors, you'll eventually find that each org has, like, one dude* with a spread sheet that powers everything else. Teams will get spun up to try to "automate" this spreadsheet, but, on a long enough time horizon, the spreadsheet wins.

[sokoloff]

Similar to the author’s cases: I’ve sat through several presentations of small teams who worked for 6-10 weeks to create a web app that does something (the details vary slightly from case to case) where at the end of the presentation, my first thought is “what a waste of effort and money; that would have taken 2-4 hours if they’d just used a spreadsheet”.

[array_key_first]

This speaks more to the complexity of web and web development than as a pro of spreadsheets.

You can create a super quick Python app with visualization and whatnot in about the same time as a spreadsheet. But then it's not online. And it's not best practice.

Web is just a fucking beast and then developers go in and add additional complexity.

It would probably be a much simpler web app if you made it just, like, a bunch of PHP scripts thrown in a folder. But they won't do that.

[analog31]

And it was probably created without approval.

[kayo_20211030]

... and been changed 3 times in the weeks it took to deliver the app.

[jader201]

I see these complaints on HN a lot, and maybe it’s anecdotal, but I just don’t see this in the real world these days.

If someone shares a sheet with me, it’s for the intended purpose of sharing data and/or visualizations of that data.

I’ve always been a huge fan of spreadsheets, and the rare times I’ve encountered them being misused, it was a long time ago, and not near enough to make me an “anti-spreadsheet” person.

It sounds like these anti-spreadsheet people need to find a new place to work and/or new coworkers.

Either way people shouldn’t be anti-spreadsheets because some people misuse them. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re a great tool for tracking/sharing/visualizing data.

[abruzzi]

> I see these complaints on HN a lot, and maybe it’s anecdotal, but I just don’t see this in the real world these days.

It happens all the time where I work. I don't want to be specific, but we have lots of examples here. In some cases people don't like the core software, so they work around it by tracking things on a spreadsheet. And sometimes that spreadsheet disappears (in one case, it was being kept on an XLSX on a USB thumb drive, but the thumb drive got corrupted and we lost some very important data.)

[jacobr1]

The availability angle changes things quite a bit. Having a single source of truth online sheet is much different than a file that is passed around.

[mebizzle]

This is anecdotal bias even now. The number of these monster spreadsheets running organizations that should be more sophisticated than they are would most likely keep anyone here up at night.

[zdragnar]

I was part of a team helping a Fortune 500 company whose inventory system was basically a master spreadsheet that maybe 8 people in the company actually had write access to. Everyone reported numbers up to them and the spreadsheet had read only views for purchase order projections.

To say that it was a nightmare was an understatement. They were willing to dump vast sums of money to get something better, but they'd homebrewed so many human processes to deal with the spreadsheet that they struggled to adapt to a more conventional way of doing things.

[zer00eyz]

Found the GAP employee.

And if you aren't this story could have come from one.

[zdragnar]

Not GAP, not even clothing, but still retail.

[jofer]

This depends a lot on what you do. Try working with a decision analyst sometime. The entire economic model with a decision tree and monte carlo analysis of cost overruns, etc for a multi-trillion dollar decision will literally be a arcanely-complex spreadsheet or two on someone's laptop.

With that said, it's still a great tool for the job because the different stakeholders can inspect it.

[citizenpaul]

>I just don’t see this in the real world these days

Lol. Go to literally any bank. They all have a legion of accountant,analyists that's sole job is to maintain their little fiefdom of spreadsheets that only they understand.

If most people knew just how held together by string,tape and gum the banking industry is there would be a run on the banks.

There is also always some 75+yo part time guy that maintains some sort of critical system. He always says, "I want to retire but they keep throwing more money at me"

[Wojtkie]

My big gripe with spreadsheets is just that there's a lot of bloat on top of the spreadsheet which makes large datasets difficult to work with.

Otherwise, I find them to be great deliverables.

[gregates]

How large are you talking about? Have you tried https://rowzero.io?

[jamesnorden]

>but I just don’t see this in the real world these days

May be due to the fact you're a single datapoint and not omnipresent at every company. What a weird argument.

[breadwinner]

You need to give them a tool that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, and yet stores data in a relational database. There are plenty of spreadsheet-database hybrids in the market.

[analog31]

Using any tool but Excel has the same problem as finding programmers who are willing to use some obscure proprietary programming language. They're going to worry about career lock if they're not developing portable skills.

Even though Excel is proprietary too, it's ubiquitous enough that people don't have to worry about it.

[nextaccountic]

What about a tool that tracks updates to shared Excel spreadsheet and replicate them in a SQL database?

And then, if somebody makes a change in the database, a trigger will update the spreadsheet

Such a two-way binding makes it possible to continue relying on spreadsheets for UX, all the while the data is not locked in there and we can also have other processes handling the data (a web app, some cron job, etc)

Maybe market it as an API for excel or something

[analog31]

I don't use Excel much, but I do the analogous kinds of things with Python and Jupyter notebooks. The problem is that adding some kind of layer requires the involvement of corporate IT, which blows away the advantages of DIY'ing things.

[breadwinner]

That's true, nothing is as ubiquitous as Excel. But Excel is not designed for multiple people simultaneously updating data. At some point you need a database.

[NotMichaelBay]

It's not perfect, but Excel can track changes by multiple users. Excel files shared on OneDrive/SharePoint allow multiple people to simultaneously update the data, and it tracks each individual change by each user.

[gregates]

Are any of them as easy to use as a spreadsheet?

[breadwinner]

I would say Airtable is. Or if your users are slightly more technical you can try https://visualdb.com/ because it lets you use your own Postgres instance as the backend db.

[mstkllah]

I feel quite comfortable in Excel - used various tools like Power Pivot, Power Query, OLEDB, created my own functions, Python within Excel, etc. - but Airtable felt so confusing and limiting. Other former colleagues also struggled with Airtable; maybe it was not explained to us correctly.

[pletnes]

I’ve used Airtable a bit. I think it’s really cool and would like more people to use it. However, it’s a lot more clicks and key presses to get things done - especially data entry - than in Excel. This also makes it better, since you can put constraints on tables, for instance.

[breadwinner]

You are absolutely right about needing more clicks and key strokes in Airtable. You have to reach the pain threshold in order to look for alternatives to Excel. And how soon you reach the pain threshold depends on how big your data is and how many users are trying to modify the same data at the same time.

See here to understand what you are missing out by not using a database: https://visualdb.com/comparison/#integrity

[snerbles]

NocoDB is also a self-hosted option. I used it to power a family project that required regular API access, but without the rate limits of Google Sheets.

[supportengineer]

That's every company I've ever worked for, whether they have 100 employees or 300,000.

[emeril]

so true - as the spreadsheet "guru" at most of my employers - most of the issues with spreadsheets is misuse which is very common sadly

though, much programming is poor and often can be accomplished better in a spreadsheet given the situation and use case...

[citizenpaul]

Excel, creating job security since 1997.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

As opposed to placing the mission critical operations in some huge enterprise Java deployment which has been touched by thousands of contractors, all of whom have only a very rudimentary understanding of the actual business logic.

I think even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders is preferred.

[array_key_first]

The main problem is that a complex spreadsheet is just code. Its a bundle of logic and data. That's code.

If the business stakeholders can edit said spreadsheet, they can code. Not well probably, but they can.

So, theoretically, they should be able to open a python script or whatever and hack away. A lot of calculations are actually much easier and straightforward in a real language as opposed to Excel.

But they won't, partially because developers would never let them.

[breadwinner]

> even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders

You can do that in a spreadsheet-database hybrid such as Airtable.