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0 pointsbluGill2mo ago0 comments

Is it? I have long thought that most things business people are using a spreadsheet for belongs someplace else. They are easy ways to run quick what-ifs or make lists, but generally the right answer is update the system so they don't need a spreadsheet. If the data is financials - why can't your accounting system give everyone the view they need from the shared system? Othertimes what they really need are a database to track this. But a spreadsheet is easy and so they ignore all the problems it creates because it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.

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horsawlarway2mo ago

> it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.

Then it's the wrong solution. Period.

There are plenty of annoyances with spreadsheets, but part of what makes them so robust and powerful is that they don't take a ton of specialized knowledge, and they remain incredibly flexible.

An expensive, complicated, static, "right" solution for a small business is folly (honestly - this stays true up to medium/large business). It's a ton of time and energy focused on the absolute wrong thing. When a spreadsheet can reach the same result in a fraction of the time.

Especially given the result may not actually be that important, and they pivot to something else entirely in the very near future.

I've worked at several startups. I'd caution even software startups from assuming that custom solutions are the right approach. They usually aren't. They're a waste of time and effort that ends up saddling you with a brittle, expensive solution designed to solve problems from last year.

bluGillOP2mo ago

You are missing something: how much is spent because the spreadsheet isn't the right solution - nobody measures this (or even knows how). How much are you risking because spreadsheets are not robust - when will a mistake catch up, and what will be the cost? There is a reason accountants use double entry bookkeeping, and spreadsheets don't have that.

Nobody has the money to spend doing things right unless they have been burned. That doesn't mean the money shouldn't be spent first.

Spreadsheets are powerful I will grant. However they are not robust. A robust system works very different and includes features (like tests) that your spreadsheet doesn't have (I don't if it could have them, but it is safe to guess they don't)

Traster2mo ago

I didn't quite mean it that way. My question is basically asking "Does this hammer know that not every problem is a nail". To give a specific answer to your question, my accounting system is excel, and "everyone" is me. There are definitely plenty of places where a database makes sense. But it's also important for database engineers to understand where databases don't make sense. It's kind of like that old problem we had where people would keep on saying "We can do X with blockchain" and the typical answer is "ok but that's worse".

teeklp2mo ago

Well, you've long thought wrong.

SolubleSnake2mo ago

Argh gawd I hate this!

There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.

Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.

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