I mean, yeah, but pretend Excel is, idk, sword arms. You get a lot of work done by whirling around the office, spinning your swords, cutting off a variety of limbs and heads in the process. You get to the end, meet the few survivors, staring dismayed at the trail of blood and dismemberment behind you, and you yell, "BUT I GOT THE JOB DONE!"
You're not wrong, but...
I wish there were some alternative where we instead fixed our ossified, byzantine processes gradually over time, so that we didn't need to break out the sword arm tornado in the name of getting work done and then, in hindsight, say, "well, shame about the negative externalities, but there really just was no other way. Ah well, let's move on, everyone who isn't a pile of flesh and blood and bits on the floor tidy up. Gotta get everything clean for the next sword arm tornado."
But the negative externalities don't seem all that big, considering. For every problem like this, you get countless millions of person-hours and dollars saved in work that wouldn't have happened at all, or would have been delayed, because of the necessity and cost of creating complex IT systems to support it.
If Excel is a sword tornado, it's one happening in an environment where everyone knows to be super vigilant about sharp objects. The alternative then would be a central processing factory that takes several years and millions of dollars to built, and which has to be turned off for a month several times a year, to change the shape of the blades used by the automated cutters.
> For every problem like this, you get countless millions of person-hours and dollars saved in work that wouldn't have happened at all,
I've found errors in every Excel spreadsheet I've ever looked at, and I'm not some master-excel user; I usually find them because - if I care about the results, I rewrite them as a Python script, so I get to go through everything.
The fact that Excel is effectively not auditable is a huge problem. There are a lot of dollars saved, like you said, but also many wasted or embezzled without anyone noticing in time because past a very low bar of complexity, it's really impossible to figure out what's happening without much, much work.
> If Excel is a sword tornado, it's one happening in an environment where everyone knows to be super vigilant about sharp objects.
... rather, no one is really careful, everyone gets a small cut every now and then, to which the apply a bandage and continue like nothing happened. And occasionally, they lose an eye or a limb or a head - and it is only those cases you read about in the newspapers.
I do not have a better suggestion, I'm afraid, but Excel is causing damage everywhere - e.g. [0], the subtitle - which I'm afraid is not an exaggeration, is "Sometimes itβs easier to rewrite genetics than update Excel"
I agree with what you wrote. It does cause a lot of small mess everywhere, and an occasional big mess. But there really isn't any better suite of tools available that hits all the non-database requirements.
You're not wrong, but...
I wish there were some alternative where we instead fixed our ossified, byzantine processes gradually over time, so that we didn't need to break out the sword arm tornado in the name of getting work done and then, in hindsight, say, "well, shame about the negative externalities, but there really just was no other way. Ah well, let's move on, everyone who isn't a pile of flesh and blood and bits on the floor tidy up. Gotta get everything clean for the next sword arm tornado."