this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
It’s a powerful tool that you shouldn’t use as a book keeping tool and ledger for a company that manages $16B. And I’ve worked on a trading floor of a big energy company. Excel was only used within departments as a tool for the employees not as the entire companies financial administration.
Excel is a fantastic tool. It is however not a database.
Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
Is it powerful? Yes
Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
Are the "powerful" features intuitive to new users? Also no.
Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
Surely its not any harder than teaching them basic SQL.
I guess it depends on what you define as "basic SQL". Because most people are already used to working with desktop apps, and familiar with the office programs specifically.
You'd essentially have to teach them programming. Its like when people say "terminal is better than GUI" (it's me, I say that) but then you forget about all of the people who don't know the difference between a desktop and a modem
It wouldn't be hard to teach them a graphical representation of SQL, something like Access I guess. Teach them concepts like joins and where clauses, and give them software that abstracts that a bit.
Then add some Excel-like features on top. Everything would end up being SQL at the end of the day, and sysadmins could then tune things to keep them fast (e.g. replicate DBs so poorly optimized queries don't hurt the whole org, esp. if a dept only needs read access).
au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.
abuse means incorrect use here. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.
You're r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.
Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.
Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it'll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.
You typoed 'popular'?
It's not... Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ), limits in columns and records, ever changing formats across versions... You asking for a disaster to happen which happens very often
You can literally label ranges to use them as variables in Excel formulae, not to mention Excel Tables has more operations and features than you'll ever need.
Unless you are working with an unfiltered, un-aggregated ledger dump straight out of your database (in which case you shouldn't be let anywhere near an office computer), it's rather hard to cross 1M+ rows and 16.4k columns in corporate finance.
The .xlsx format was introduced in 2007 (18 years ago) and hasn't changed since. Not to mention you can still use all kinds of plaintext formats whenever you want.
Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it :-) About ranges... can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?
Would you like this in excel formula, VBA, or python?
It can be done in all. You're only proving the other poster's point. Excel isn't necessarily the best option for tech literate people but given the tech illiteracy of many offices, it isn't surprising they use excel for stuff like this.
I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.
=OFFSET(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell.Such a weird argument that you've responding to, as the answer (as you provided) is so easy and well known.