Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blumkvist 4133 days ago
There are a plethora of plugins to do monte-carlo simulations, linear programming, statistical models and anything else a business user would do in the data analysis world.

Vendors include SAS, Oracle, IBM, Predixion.

Also Excel is used as a self-service BI tool. It has ETL, OLAP and dynamic dashobarding.
2 comments
bigger_cheese 4133 days ago
My company uses SAS fairly heavily for data analysis and bussiness reporting. It's also our go to tool for ad-hoc querries of production databases (essentialy a SQL gui).

Excel (and other spreadsheet packages like Calc) are good for non technical users it's useful for rapidly prototyping stuff but it is absolutely a pain for automation and any type of statistical heavy lifting. Once a spreadsheet reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes a pain to support and maintain much better to have a real database driving things.

I've heard a lot about R which is kind of an open-source version of SAS (at least the statistical parts) not sure what its automation and reporting support is like my limited understanding is it doesn't have the BI parts.

link
jayfehr 4133 days ago
My first job out of college was converting all the Excel spreadsheets that ran the business to web apps so I certainly know how they are used, and more importantly, how they are abused.

If Excel had a real scripting language as it's Macro language the problem wouldn't be nearly so bad. All that business code could just be copy/pasted, have some unit tests implemented then refactored so that the accountants code is now updated by the developer. As it is now the code has to completely rewritten in a new language.

As for the language choice, VB.Net or C# would be fine. I'm not saying it has to be Python. My complaint is that the code is non-transferrable. The apps cannot grow past Excel, and the email the most recent version to the next guy game gets you into versioning hell rather quickly.

link
emodendroket 4133 days ago
Office 2013 has some nascent JavaScript scripting; maybe someday it will overtake VBA.
link
shamney 4133 days ago
was vba too hard for you to learn?
link
blumkvist 4133 days ago
But you're a developer. A sales manager (for example) couldn't care less about your objections.

He wants his pivot tables, KPIs and Solver and some macros. He wants point-and-click ETL. If it's a department/cross-department model, do it in SQL Server, or whatever else you use. You can use your IT kung-fu there. This is about what libre office lacks. Excel has power and flexibility and remains easy to use for non-programmers.

link
jayfehr 4133 days ago
I agree with those points. My comments are in regards to Macros. Why is VBA better for a sales manager? Why not use VB.Net, Python or C#? There is nothing inherently better about VBA.

My issues with Excel come from the perspective of modifying these ad-hoc apps (many business run off these for a long time as they grow). Yes, there are other great features, but for me, for growth, Calc is taking a better approach.

link
shamney 4133 days ago
what were you not able to accomplish with vba? you can use c# with excel as well. http://exceldna.codeplex.com
link