Why does everyone use Excel?

[Shoseki]

I know this sounds like an obvious question, but bear with me.

I was having a chat with a senior administrator at the university where I work the other day. He is a project manager of a large international and multi-million euro project, he has to manage many different aspects of this project, including conferences, so it includes finances, personnel, and all sorts of other things that I (as a techy) don't really understand.

I was curious as to the advanced tools that such a complex system must use, and I was shocked to realise that 99% of it was done "with Excel", not only as a storage "format" for a lot of data, but the entire processes and everything, all through excel.

Now I am sure that during the 70s or whenever spreadsheets started to be used heavily in business and transferred from the old pen and paper booklets for accounting etc it probably was an enormous step to move to excel, but as someone who writes software for a living, excel doesn't seem a particularly complex piece. Its useful, its practical, it is easy to use, but I don't see it as the be all and end all of management software.

Of course, I have heard of, though not had any experience of, complex management systems that companies like Oracle and SAP produce, though obviously not being from a MBA or similar background, don't really have a clear idea of how they work.

The question that I have, which is more of a question towards lay-men, which is why I put it here rather than in a technical forum, is, why is Excel (or spreadsheets in general, obviously I would push form Open Office equivalent) so widespread for use in management? Why is it, that as soon as someone thinks "ah here is something I need to manage e.g. a list of peoples' email addressses" they immediately think of opening up a spreadsheet?

My opinions of Excel are :

1) Easy to use, but also dangerously easy to use. Its easy to open up the incorrect document, click on the wrong part of a document, edit a macro, rename something, damage some part of your "process", without realising it. And of course, the types of people using Excel in this way don't use something like Subversion to track and backup their data most of the time.

2) Poor at modelling the data structures / process being managed. Because of this, its not obvious if there is something wrong, other than some numbers not being correct at the end of a column/row.

Now, I am not saying that a million bespoke systems per company/organisation are the way forward, processes/systems change all of the time, so they would never be stable. But is the use of Excel as a "catch-all" simply due to a lack of technical expertise? Or is it drummed into certain business courses that the best way to manage something is with spreadsheets?

I myself had to stop someone when they asked me to maintain a user list of email addresses... they were suggesting excel. But it was obvious, if I was going to manage 4.5k email addresses by hand, it would be a pain to get people to email me if they wanted to be removed, track invalid email addresses etc. In the end I decided to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phplist phplist, which is open source.

/sigh

 

[~J~]

VBA. Simple as that. You could write your program to check the email addresses within minutes as you'd create an Outlook object from within the VBA aspects of Excel and let the Outlook calls handle the rest.

It's a VERY underrated system.

 

[Shoseki]

VBA. Simple as that. You could write your program to check the email addresses within minutes as you'd create an Outlook object from within the VBA aspects of Excel and let the Outlook calls handle the rest.

It's a VERY underrated system.

You mean visual basic? But

a) I don't know visual basic, I generally program c++/java, I don't necessarily want to go learn vb just to manage some email addresses.

b) The typical manager I have described can't program, or doesn't have experience programming, and I wouldn't expect them to. Math formulae are one thing, programming is another.

c) most of the stuff I said above, about it being dodgy to manage by hand, easy to corrupt, not great to check. At least the phplist, users can remove themselves from the list as they like, or sign up even more. Also, its a database that can be accessed anywhere, unlike excel which is on my hard disk, is easily lost, damaged by others etc etc

 

[Tomsk]

I've written a few applications using Excel. Before then I used MS-BASIC!
My main reasons were that Excel allows for easy design of input forms and printable output. I did try VB but designing input forms and formatting printed output would have taken longer to code than the guts of the appilication itself.

I don't use Excel for databases, although I have used it as a temporarily for things such as DVD and CD collections and membership lists

 

[denby]

You mean visual basic? But

a) I don't know visual basic, I generally program c++/java, I don't necessarily want to go learn vb just to manage some email addresses.

b) The typical manager I have described can't program, or doesn't have experience programming, and I wouldn't expect them to. Math formulae are one thing, programming is another.

c) most of the stuff I said above, about it being dodgy to manage by hand, easy to corrupt, not great to check. At least the phplist, users can remove themselves from the list as they like, or sign up even more. Also, its a database that can be accessed anywhere, unlike excel which is on my hard disk, is easily lost, damaged by others etc etc

vb6 and vba are different

 

[The_TailGunner]

the beauty of it is that you don't need to know how to program to do what J is describing - you can just go and pinch the code and a set of easy step by step instructions to set it up from a forum you can find by googling in a few minutes.

I guess most people use it as that's whats already installed on 90%+ of office computers, it can do the job, is useable by total tech noobs to perform complicated tasks.

Most managers don't have any say in what apps are installed on the company machines, and IT are invariably a pain in the hole to get to change anything.

Its just a case of doing the job with the tools you have at hand, really.

TG

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Excel is a very powerful with some carefully written macros.

Used endlessly here.

 

[~J~]

No, I meant VBA (there's a MASSIVE difference).

But the solution is within the name "BASIC". Over in the programming section of these forums there's a collection of, shall we say, "Know it alls" that diss VB (and VBA) because it hasn't got the techno jargon of the 21stC.

But being BASIC (and as a Java/C++ programmer yourself, you must appreciate this) the syntax used is relatively simple to follow.

Most Excel users will at some point encounter a Macro, and if they look at this macro, they'll see the VBA code that goes to run their macro. It's easy to understand, it's easy to follow, they'll dabble with it, play with it, enhance it, and learn from that.

It's offers loads of advantages; they can 'give' this spreadsheet with the code on to a co-worker, and it will run. No compilation, no "Setup", the co-worker simply needs to run a macro and it will work. Brilliant!

As new versions of Office come out, it will work. They can 'email' this spreadsheet to Jimmy Wong in China, and it will work. It's great.

I honestly think you'll be surprised just how many people will work like this. I know loads of organsations that have their own "program" that something like the Financial Controller did over a few weeks at home, or the MD did whilst reading "Excel for dummies".

They don't class themselves as programmers as you've said, ask them to program something and they'll say they've never programmed anything in their life, but it's a very easy to use system.

 

[Shoseki]

the beauty of it is that you don't need to know how to program to do what J is describing - you can just go and pinch the code and a set of easy step by step instructions to set it up from a forum you can find by googling in a few minutes.

I guess most people use it as that's whats already installed on 90%+ of office computers, it can do the job, is useable by total tech noobs to perform complicated tasks.

Most managers don't have any say in what apps are installed on the company machines, and IT are invariably a pain in the hole to get to change anything.

Its just a case of doing the job with the tools you have at hand, really.

TG

It is easy, I am not denying it, however, normal administrators are *not* going to go pinch code online and use it. Most of them can't program, or are fearful of how that part works. And even so, that is like saying that a software engineer decides to use a piece of code he used online and just plug it in, without really knowing how it works, what it will do etc. Its just not feasible. I am not talking about open apis etc, I am talking about business processes, and the suggestion is that excel is a software development environment, but useable by non-professionals. That makes it pretty unique.

If, for example, you modelled your business processes, knew exactly what type of information you were going to receive, you could set up databases and queries to produce the types of data necessary and manage the business processes. However, they choose *not* to do that, and just use excel. Access can do this - so why isn't it used?

 

[~J~]

But they can Shoseki. Most businesses will use "Office" rather than the application (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access) as an individual entity.

So straight away, to use your example, they know the wonders of Access, maybe created a simple database based on ye olde faithful Northwind, and they can see that they can create a Database object within VBA.

From then on, the world is their oyster! They can use Excel to do all the calculations (say sales reps figures) and when they run their macro, they can get these figures and store them in the Employee Database that's been created in Access.

No VB.Net. No C#. No SQL2005. No 3rd party tools. No huge development costs for some outside contractor. They've done it themselves!

 

[Haircut]

A large part of the investment banking world uses Excel.

Where I used to work they had all kinds of crazy Excel add-ins written in C++ to do fany things for the traders.
They've been doing it that way for years and are usually very reluctant to change.

 

[Simon]

Ive seen people do dynamic simulations of bearing forces using Excel! Its more than just a calculator.

 

[Jonnycoupe]

Ive seen people do dynamic simulations of bearing forces using Excel! Its more than just a calculator.

Try fan blade off situations in jet engines and the strutural effects on the wing components to see if the aircraft will still fly at various exit angles aswell. Ive also used Excel to generate part numbers of bolts from length of its stuff gripping, cant really fault the functionality of it.

Once you start using lists and condition formatting you can make reading the information better.

OP, what alternatives are there to Excel on MS based workstations?

 

[Solari]

I've written some very handy and time-saving apps in Excel/bit of VBA. It's quite simple to get quite a complex process done so Excel is something MS deserve kudos for

Some of the peeps where I work write all sorts of crazy apps in Excel - it's quite impressive what can be done.

 

[Shoseki]

I am very aware of the fact that Excel is a powerful tool. However, it isn't exactly billed as a "stable software platform", "powerful database solution", or anything else.

Its just interesting to see that managers become programmers, but even if they might know the processes they are trying to manage, they don't have anything other than Microsoft Office to work with.

I have been discussing this with a guy who works for my other job, I do web development for a smaller independant wholesaler. They wouldn't dream of processing hundreds of orders / packaging/tracking etc using something like office, they have a dedicated accounts package that tracks and balances everything. Of course this is fairly specific to the type of work that they do (selling large amounts of stuff). Doing something like this would be an *absolute* pain with excel.

So why are other managers in other positions using excel? Are their processes really noddy? Is it not necessary to be able to prove that their systems work, are able to be rigourously tested, that the formulaes used can be easily checked and managed?

I worked for a company as a statistician a couple of years ago, and within a couple of days immediately noticed and flagged a big obvious mistake in one of their macro heavy excel spreadsheets - they were doing averages of averages, which doesn't work. However, none of the people using the macros had any idea how to fix it, were too embaressed to flag it up (especially as it was really obvious). Their entire system was very manual, difficult to check... and difficult to explain to someone else! They couldn't even diagram exactly how their system worked, who developed it or anything, it just kind of "grew together" piecemeal without any real structure / validation.

 

[spp]

It's so easy to use. I used to model dark matter halos using excel back in my undergrad days. I suspect thats the reason everyone else uses it.

 

[Solari]

Is it not necessary to be able to prove that their systems work, are able to be rigourously tested, that the formulaes used can be easily checked and managed?

I tend to keep a seperate protected sheet with formulae templates and a "Fix" button on the normal sheet(s) which runs a macro to copy and autofill, therefore avoiding some idiot messing things up

 

[Participant]

You can't possibly knock Excel, it's fantastic. Sometimes people don't want to use Access because it's a) not always necessary and b) perceived as being harder to use.

 

[pitchfork]

Its a good bit of software, I don't know a spredsheet program which is better and i've tried a few of em.

 

[~J~]

I am very aware of the fact that Excel is a powerful tool. However, it isn't exactly billed as a "stable software platform", "powerful database solution", or anything else.

Well personally, I think it's rock solid. Sure there are one or two bugs that crop up now and then (like the 256*256 on 2007 one of recent days), but I still say Office, as a whole, is a pretty stable product. Maybe I'm biased towards Microsoft as I am a massive fanboy, but it just goes to show how they think by offering this additional functionality.

Its just interesting to see that managers become programmers, but even if they might know the processes they are trying to manage, they don't have anything other than Microsoft Office to work with.

That's just it though, they don't class themselves as programmers. They'll say "they created something" or they "made a big macro" but they won't class themselves as programmers.

I have been discussing this with a guy who works for my other job, I do web development for a smaller independant wholesaler. They wouldn't dream of processing hundreds of orders / packaging/tracking etc using something like office, they have a dedicated accounts package that tracks and balances everything. Of course this is fairly specific to the type of work that they do (selling large amounts of stuff). Doing something like this would be an *absolute* pain with excel.

Why wouldn't you? It's like what I said weeks ago when a discussion was raised on the programming about buying 3rd party tools from the net or writing your own. If YOU wrote own own function to calculate the VAT percentage based on an average of 30 rows, it would be YOUR code that is doing this. You may be the best programmer in the world, but you could still introduce a small bug into the system. Excel has been tested hundreds, if not thousands of more times than any software you could produce, so why shouldn't you use the tools available? If office can show/track changes with 99.9% accuracy, and has been used for years by hundreds of thousand of people around the world with no problems, then why risk the introduction of your code?

I worked for a company as a statistician a couple of years ago, and within a couple of days immediately noticed and flagged a big obvious mistake in one of their macro heavy excel spreadsheets - they were doing averages of averages, which doesn't work. However, none of the people using the macros had any idea how to fix it, were too embaressed to flag it up (especially as it was really obvious). Their entire system was very manual, difficult to check... and difficult to explain to someone else! They couldn't even diagram exactly how their system worked, who developed it or anything, it just kind of "grew together" piecemeal without any real structure / validation.

Again, you've kinda answered the question. They aren't programmers, so they won't think like a programmer. Why should they show diagrams of a system process like a programmer would? But it's not their 'programming' that's caused the problem, it's their logic. If they'd passed on their requirements to you, an independent software developer, and said they wanted to work out an average of an average, who are you to argue? You could advise them sure, but if that's what they wanted, then you'd do it. So again, Excel isn't at fault, Excel is doing exactly what they wanted.