I 100% believe if some scripting language like Python was taught in schools instead of excel we would be in a MUCH better place. I have to deal with user created excel contraptions everyday at my work and they make me want to cry
A few years back, someone at corporate made an Excel based “program” for planning our trade shows. It was the most rage inducing rickety ass bullshit contraption I have ever had to deal with. It was basically a data entry wizard GUI for a spreadsheet. But it would crash every 2-3 entries, and lose all the data that had been added since the last save. The only way to save the data involved closing it and restarting it. So I had to close/reopen after every entry just to keep from having to risk redoing it all multiple times.
How’s LibreOffice at pivot tables nowadays?
Follow-up question, how’s LibreOffice at telling my tech illiterate boss she has to go to IT to get admin rights to install LO so she can open the file I just sent her because I don’t morally want to support Microsoft?
MS Office can open LO documents.
Two things: VBA and the autosum formula keyboard shortcut.
i do all my finances in a physical ledger labeled ‘never show to the IRS’
Huh. I don’t know about the financial system but I’m guessing a good chunk of it is ran by some old mainframes.
It’s like the retail industry, still massively relying on IBM i/iSeries/AS400. I worked for a consulting company that was doing a little bit of admin and support work for companies still using this system and the list is still very long. At least it still receives updates, and it’s kind of fun/odd to work with if you like CLI, but it’s super expensive and absolutely proprietary.
Just gonna drop this here: http://visidata.org/
Blows excel out of the water, at least for tabular data (which, frankly, is what all financial data should be… Cell-based formulas are a mistake).
Watch Microsoft ruin another good thing!
A lot of good answers, but my bet is the third party plug-ins. Does librecalc have SAP Analysis, or the other plug-ins to connect excel to the accounting systems?
SAP is some kind of communicable brain cancer. My company (has factories in over a dozen countries) has been trying to implement it for almost 10 years now. A 5 min job now takes 30min because of all the paperwork that has to go along with it.
SAP stands for Slow Arduous Process.
Why not use database, actually. I am yet to see anything related to money that is not a rabbit hole of wildly different things interacting by wildly unexpected logic. Ffs, is writing esoteric formulae in a spreadsheet really easier than learning some SQL dialect with a few pretty advanced and specific features?
Queue a 6 month approval process to access data for s’curity
Nice catch, I am annoyed as fuck with access approval even as a dev. But, since I am advocating for moving financial analysis to using databases instead of spreadsheets, it becomes my problem, so: me makes a separate db for this very purpose, and the access is given to any and all accountants. Security guys are welcome to join the dev process of preparing the db and data flows that write from other sources into it, so that financial guys have up-to-date state of data: want restrictions - go ahead and tell them they don’t need this and that
counter question: Do you want the people that butcher Excel spreadsheets into abominations to be let loose on your database?
The key advantage of a database ti have everything in one place is also its greatest danger.
You make forms that talk to the dBASE, you don’t give them actual dBASE access
No, I will give them a separate one, and when they make a mess out of it, I’ll make it known, then fix it without any hurry, then they make another kind of mess, I make it known, fix it with no hurry, then… at some point either they learn (because they make efforts or because get told to by superior management), or I reach the conclusion that working here isn’t worth it and move on
You want us to use access? No one wants to use access I’ll just make a hyperlink to another book on the last cell
scShould be COBOL
Anyone who works FinTech knows that’s it’s these Mainframes and HPNS systems running on code written in Latin maintained by guys working past retirement that are the frayed rope holding the debit and credit transaction system together.
three reasons:
- power query
- keyboard shortcuts
- pioneer for new functions (e.g., xlookup, dot-colon, let, etc)
oh, and excel doesn’t crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
Libre office is significantly more stable for me than office365 on a win11 machine running on hardware from 2023. It just always works and quickly.
oh, and excel doesn’t crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
then you aren’t running anything past Excel 2016
Of course not, we’re talking about Enterprise here. Newer versions of Excel won’t run on Windows XP.
You can’t swap Excel with anything else. Are you going to trust that millions of man-hours of work will translate perfectly? Going to take that risk with your company?
Even if you started your business with another spreadsheet, you still have to use Excel sheets from others.
Because you don’t even dare breathe on load-bearing legacy systems. You want to change the whole app, you insolent heretic?!
The more important a system is, the more the engineers involved need to be used to changing the system.
Of course, no engineering is really involved in excel-based legacy systems, which is a large part of why they are as dangerous as they are.
