Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601 <comment><USER4> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming.

It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming.

Within the Amazon warehouse world, I have seen incredible innovation using it. An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers lives while serving in Afghanistan[0].

I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190)

<comment><USER5> I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over).

Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - <USER2> it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication, built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different topic).

Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases. Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed. This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases.

In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.

<comment><USER6> > my career in business software has still mostly been about converting > spreadsheets into more "proper" applications.

Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best:

> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS > app still needs to be built.

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657)

FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries to read and write spreadsheets ([https://github.com/sheetjs/js- xlsx](https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx), demo [http://oss.sheetjs.com/](http://oss.sheetjs.com/)) ended up garnering lots of demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications

<comment><USER7> > Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS > app still needs to be built.

It's a pithy quote, you'll get a very different reaction from a finance or small to med-sized business professional.

Excel is the ultimate maker studio that actually lives up to the promise of "build your own mini-app". I'm not saying it can't be improved on. It's just that the core model of flexibility is so compelling, pushing everyone into a SaaS app is invariably going to take away substantial power from the user.

<comment><USER6> Excel is an incredible swiss army knife when dealing with one person in one location on one computer, but the warts start showing up when any of those assumptions break.

One computer: once you decide you want to use your smartphone, for all but the most basic sheets there are problems with Excel mobile preview, even with Microsoft's official apps.

One location: Excel's lack of a universal time (showing different times in for users in different timezones) have led to gnarly workarounds. There was an attempt to correct for it in the XLSX format (cell type 'd') but it has its own problems.

One person: Excel has no inherent sync strategy. You are forced to farm out to email (and the inherent filename versioning nonsense) or use a system like SharePoint (which has its own problems you notice when dealing with people in different timezones across the world, like accidental file locking and data loss)

<comment><USER7> I hear you. I think One Computer and One Person issues have generally been solved by Office Online or Google Spreadsheets. I can't speak to difficulty around lack of universal time nor do I know how important of a requirement that is to most companies.

Any solution, SaaS or otherwise, will have flaws. It might solve Excel's weaknesses really well, but will likely lack its strengths.

Excel is still going strong in 2017 to a large degree because its strengths continue outweigh its weaknesses and that people have found reasonable ways, or add-on tools, to work around it's weaknesses.

It will be interesting to see in the coming decade if niche industry solutions or an even more incredible swiss army knife were to come around and dethrone the incumbent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The phrases _" avoid data silos"_ and _" we want single source of truth"_ have been used repeatedly about Excel misuse/abuse/overuse for 20+ years. The WSJ story talks about the complaint but not about the underlying tension between data redundancy vs data manipulation.

Excel endures because it's the non-programmer's REPL for data. Like a Lisp REPL, using Excel is nimble and has an instant feedback loop. Click "A-Z" to sort ascending, click "Z-A" to sort descending. Move/hide/freeze columns. If one has intermediate-to-advanced skills, one can pivot the data on multiple axis. None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel's capabilities.

That's why the centralized systems like SAP ERP, Microsoft Team Foundation, mainframe sytems, etc offer functionality to _export_ to Excel spreadsheets. (Or they offer export to csv files -- which is 1 step removed from Excel.) With MS TFS, you can even _re-import_ from Excel so in that case, Excel acts as a sort of offline data-entry client for the project management tool.

One middle ground between Excel data silos and the utopia of a centralized system is a shared document store like Sharepoint or Dropbox. The hierarchy would be something like:

1) Excel spreadsheets emailed around. Lots of redundancy; uncertainty of which version is canonical.

2) Excel xls file stored on Sharepoint with automatic version control. Employees must have discipline to only email _links_ to the "one true" spreadsheet and never attach the actual xls file in the emails.

3) The data that was in Excel is migrated to centralized system and all data entry and reporting is done there. However, because the central systems are so cumbersome, this abstraction "leaks" back out to Excel because of the highly desired "export to Excel" functions! (This restarts the dreaded Excel "data silos" complaint cycle all over again.)

There isn't an IT department in the world that can develop centralized IT solutions fast enough to keep up with the ways employees slice & dice data. That's why Excel is "overused".

<comment><USER9> _None of the centralized systems with even the slickest web GUIs can match Excel 's capabilities._

You can very easily use Excel as a client to a central database and get the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER10> Actually you run into the one of Excel's biggest problems when you do this, namely "Multiple versions of the truth". Here's how that happens: The central database often contains bad data. Users "fix" the bad data in their spreadsheet. Excel doesn't have the ability to write the updated data back to the database. Now everyone has their own versions of "the truth". There are products that attempt to solve this problem by adding the ability to write modified data back to the database. See for example Pebble Reports, [http://pebblereports.com/features/](http://pebblereports.com/features/) but this is a reporting program and does not have spreadsheet capabilities.

<comment> 52-6F-62 My first question was going to follow the poster above, and you answered it for me. I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?

Aside from that — what about MS cloud services? I mean, maybe that's not appropriate for healthcare or certain businesses, but for others it allows there to be a single source of truth if the workflow is correctly tuned, no? I can produce a doc in my local instace, push to 365, edit remotely on the web, have somebody else edit remotely, and sync it back to my local instance without a hitch.

I use Office365 for that purpose regularly at my job. I'm a developer, but I have regular communication with editors, producers, project managers, division managers, operations managers, art directors, and so on. A lot of the information we share is tabled and needs to stay updated, and editable by each party involved. It's worked well for me in that regard.

Maybe others have had different experiences?

<comment><USER11> "I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?"

Well, more accurately, it _can_ write back to the database, but normal usage of Excel won't _afford_ that result. Normal usage of Excel you have an independent value.

It is also a dubious proposition as to whether we want people to actually write back to the central database; you'd be one stray macro away from disaster. You sorta want it if someone manually corrects something, but not if they operate on it programmatically, and now we're making things really complicated.

<comment><USER12> There shouldn't be any risk if you have version control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > A year ago, Mr. Bell's team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel > spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and > performance tracking of the company's 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the > same process takes minutes.

Then I believe it should say stop _abusing_ Excel.

Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate data from 400+ sources, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER14> This is the point that's going to get missed a lot. In the corporate world Excel is the proverbial hammer to nearly every use case involving data manipulation, regardless of how well suited it is for the task.

 _Edit:_ I just noticed that I'm the third person to reply to you and we all referenced hammers.

<comment><USER15> I don't know that Excel was the wrong tool for this task. I'm not sure why the spreadsheets couldn't have been distributed and consumed automatically by an Excel application, or at least by helper applications that were fed by and/or into Excel sheets. An Excel spreadsheet is a good enough form; and I don't think replacing one with a webform or pdf form would be any better.

edit: my favorite thing about using excel is that instead of spitting out an answer, you can spit out an Excel sheet that shows a lot of the work itself, therefore _partially explaining the answer_ to the people that have to consume it. The product of your program can often be another program, giving the person receiving the report the opportunity to tweak or add new parameters to your output. Basically currying accounting calculations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The core complaint of not having a single source of truth seems more about how the company handles data/filing rather than Excel itself.

Maybe I'm a bit bias having used Excel my entire career and very dependent on it, but everytime I've seen companies steer away from the desktop application with 0365/sheets/tableau its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.

<comment><USER17> >its simply not as useful for adhoc data analysis and reporting.

<rant>

You wanna know what's even more useful? Code notebooks.

I store everything from my sql queries to my processing pipeline to my models, and my vizualizations. Most notebooks have slide-show modes now so your presentation to business stakeholders is simple to prepare as well, and with the right plotting packages you can draw interactive charts that do all the fancy stuff. And when it's time to update the analysis, you just re-run the notebook.

But business analysts are too freaking lazy to just learn to write some python or R, and they're perfectly happy to get paid to do the same task over and over again when it comes time to making updates.

And don't get me started on source control.

</rant>

<comment><USER18> Most business analysts who are pulling this kind of data have a finance background. To say that they're "too lazy" because they don't want to do their work using Python seems a bit harsh.

In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad ones that bring the database server to its knees.

<comment><USER17> >In practice what I've seen is that IT and finance departments don't even let business analysts write their own SQL queries for fear that they'll write bad ones that bring the database server to its knees

I'll take data warehouses for 600, Alex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is NOT about "inefficiencies", "data security" or whatever.

In big biz, the "finance chiefs" (or other persons with purchase authority) usually get pampered by vendors with expensive business trips or whatever... especially at the scales that require SAP or Oracle solutions. So this likely means: the CFOs bought some expensive software that promises to replace Excel without any due diligence, the staff looks at the software and decides it's crap and continues to use Excel => CFO gets mad because no one uses the expensive software.

If you don't believe me, just ask yourselves how Oracle, IBM and Accidenture are still in business despite numerous highly expensive and publicized failures. It's all due to CxO pampering (in addition to a bit of vendor lock in).

<comment><USER20> What's Accidenture?

<comment><USER19> "Nickname" for Accenture, an IT consulting/bodyshop famous for delivering stuff at waaay less than acceptable quality (or not delivering at all). In addition they're also known for exploiting their employees.

See also [http://exposingevilempire.com/](http://exposingevilempire.com/).

<comment><USER20> Is it different from other giant IT services firms?

<comment><USER19> No, but Accidenture is the most known of the bunch. And the other IT "service" companies, well, guess how they get their contracts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm only use spreadsheets here and there., bit this article has the kind of grating stupidity that adds to the conceptual noise we are surrounded with.

To replace Excel with software X, you would have to deliver software that would provide the Same kind of flexibilty. That is a very difficult kind of software to develop!

One very basic and powerful aspect of excel is simply the fluidity of the display. You can cram a lot of information onto a single screen, resize and move rows/columns, use colors.

As apposed to a clunky web app interface that has low information density, inflexible data scheme,and the crippled UX of a typical web app.

That's not to say that the example given in the article doesn't point out a real problem. But I wonder if doing some custom UI and re-factoring while building on the current system the users already understand wouldn't be a much more cost effective strategy.

When I see the clunky interfaces that so many workers are saddled with these days, it makes me sad.

<comment><USER22> I used to work for a finance department that tried to implement a fancy driver based tool to replace an endless amount of spreadsheets. We spent so many hours and I'm sure a lot of money on the software license and consultants who built it and in the end it just wasn't flexible enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and > exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data > telling us," Mr. Garrett said

This!

I know this is reality in so many companies that don't have technically educated staff to tell them about more suitable ways to do it. So the teams get data from one department or system, manually transform data (in the editor via search/replace), and if they are "very sophisticated" they save it in MS Access, join tables, connect the dots, export back to Excel, analyse the data via Pivot Tables etc. And they do these steps repeatedly, every week. Without stopping and asking if there might be better solutions out there. (In German IT curriculums they call this "Medienbruch" = "media discontinuity"?)

I have seen this in so many companies and thought to myself: This is an excellent case for a consulting pitch. And I could literally transform their work.

And I am not talking about selling data warehouse solutions with ETL processes and the like.

Twenty years ago I realized I could do all these preprocessing and transformations with Perl. Now I do these kind of things with Python and Pandas etc. So there are so many solutions that are a huge improvement. Still these departments do it with Excel/VBA/Access.

<comment><USER24> Don't forget the all-to-common scenario:

"Executive 1 likes to see the data presented in formats A and B, Executive 2 likes to see it presented in formats C and D, and occasionally E, and Executive 3 will only look at it if you format it as F and cut/paste it to PowerPoint."

So you end up with 20 analysts who all have input, each manually re-formatting their own data in 6 different ways, making sure they all stay in sync. Then someone else collates it all together into 3 different exec-specific presentations, and double checks to make sure they tell approximately the same story. Welcome to life as an office drone!

<comment><USER22> I used to work as a corporate financial planning analyst and this hit way too close to home.

Then one executive who didn't like the story would have one of his analysts pull the same data in a slightly different way and adjust it. The executive would then show it to the CFO and tell him that's the real story. The CFO would turn to you and ask why his number is different than yours. Then you would spend hours with the analyst reconciling the data and building a waterfall chart to send to the CFO to explain the difference.

Then if you're really unlucky the CFO says he wants to see the data both ways with a waterfall reconciliation every month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the problem is they're using Excel as a database as opposed to a spreadsheet. That's fine at small scale, it's easier to manage and even easier to get going, but Adobe scale? They should advise "Stop using Excel for what it's not".

</comment><comment><USER26> I've worked in many large companies, and I have never seen one using SAP or other large tools as single sources. It always has been excel. From my experience due to 3 reasons

\- excel is much more flexible, I can add a column, delete those I don't want etc

\- speed: many of those large corporate systems are just damn slow, maybe because of stupid configurations, but still often very slow an annoying

\- analysis: It's easy to do some basic analysis without studying CS

<comment><USER27> I agree with those 3 reasons, but I wouldd add a fourth: easy to create your own version of the truth.

I'm not implying this is due to nefarious reasons (though sometimes it is): sometimes the official version of the truth is just not adequate.

<comment><USER28> Definitely, great point. Tools like Tableau/Power BI make it very easy to get a misleading version of the truth, since it can very easily include misleading data points and/or make calculations in a fashion that leads the user to misinterpret KPIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> All of the cases where I have seen Excel sheets get "out of control" are not because someone came along and decided to implement a complex system in Excel, far from it. I tend to see small, well suited, sheets being created in Excel, and then iteratively new features get added

"Wouldn't it be great to automatically get averages each month"

"Perhaps we could pull in exchange rates so we have up to date currency values"

"As we need to compare this to employees here, and because we actually have a list of employees in another sheet for holiday and sickness, why don't we put the employees into another separate sheet and cross reference it from both places"

"When we add a new employee wouldn't it be nice if these sheets automatically update"

"We want to pull in this live data every day at midnight, perhaps we can have an automated job for that"

Then when someone says "hmm, I don't think Excel is the right tool for the job" there is often general agreement, but at that point there are lots of interconnected sheets, formulas, external data being pulled in, cron jobs, etc. and the system manages a lot of different things, none of which you particularly want to be without and despite the complexities, people have been with it over iterations, so they are actually quite familiar with how it all works.

But then a couple of people with the knowledge leave, a new person takes over, and their first job is to remove Excel and come up with a much better system. They try, users complain it doesn't do certain things as well, over time in improves, somehow certain things never seem quite as good, but then new features have been added so people forget and find the next thing to complain about instead!

<comment><USER24> To be fair, this kind of unobstructed scope creep is how all software gets "out of control," not just Excel sheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Stop using paper", says chief of a company that treats modified copies as if they were originals, "if we all carved our work on to this big stone in the middle of the courtyard then we'd be rid of our paper problems".

<comment><USER31> "Wall Street is investing into the new pyramids. Here is why."

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It is amazing how many simple tasks at a company can be done with Excel that as programmers we often write custom code for. When all you have is a hammer...

At the same time. I have seen banks transfer money between branches by literally FTP transferring an Excel file. At some point there has got to be a better way. At least use SFTP :)

<comment><USER33> I've thought about this before. Does it mean that our libraries aren't good enough? Do we just not know how to use them?

I often wish there was an intermediate between writing a fully custom piece of software for something and using excel. This about how many times you've worked on a web service (or other technology) and how much of the code is basically identical to every other webservice in that technology minus some unique data models and a few functions of custom logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just something I discovered recently that entirely takes care of the problem if you have ONE PERSON who knows how to code: Google Sheets with the IMPORTHTML() function.

You host a web server that runs Python or PHP or whatever and it queries and pulls data from any number of places, and dumps the information to CSV. Then in the Google Doc, you request the data from your server with the IMPORTHTML function. It populates your spreadsheet automatically, and then you can show graphs and other various things. And it will update on its own!

There you have it! Single source of truth! And you still get to use a spreadsheet!

It's a fucking beautiful, elegant solution to the entire "Excel problem" that I don't see enough people using.

Instead they're going with enterprise 3rd party "solutions", like Anaplan. Who knows how much money they're blowing because the execs don't know tech...

<comment><USER35> Unless I'm missing something, this only provides a way to display data from a database. But users cannot _write_ to the database via the Google Sheet, and it thus doesn't solve the problem...

<comment><USER34> Oh god you're right, I just re-read the article and realized what they're doing now.

It didn't even occur to me that anyone would use Excel _as the database_. Holy hell. Nevermind.

Still, it shouldn't be hard to convert Excel to an SQL database. Then you dump to CSV, and use ImportHTML to have a spreadsheet be your source of information.

<comment><USER36> Excel can use databases as a data source, there's no need for all your extra steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine article [1].

[1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

<comment><USER38> It sure does smell like a PR assisted attack on excel in favor of enterprise solutions

<comment><USER39> This is true, but, I also clicked because of the title. Well baited trap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The title is overblown. There's a push to stop using Excel as:

* the single source of truth for a set of primary data

* the mechanism by which regular (i.e. repeated) reports and analysis are conducted

But it overlooks the fact that:

* Excel has, for many years, had real-time integration to pull data from many systems (not just 'Export to Excel', but the ability to pull data via ODBC connectors). I've used this, e.g. to pull trial balances from Sage into Excel for custom, but repeated, financial reporting.

* You can't beat Excel as a prototyping tool, or for ad hoc analysis from disparate data sources (without a huge learning curve for the people we're talking about). Telling finance/accounting professionals not to use Excel is like telling designers to use D3.js instead of Illustrator. D3 might integrate better with data sources, and be easier to version control and share etc., but for a quick sketch you'll use Illustrator.

From the title, you'd assume these 'Finance Chiefs' were expecting none of their staff would even need Excel installed, after some transition period, but this isn't the case. There's always some lag between the needs you have, and the capability of more structured tools.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've worked with customers to setup support units specifically for Excel, helping their organisations develop and validate Excel spreadsheets and consider migration to more robust solutions when the time is right. As much as I dislike the general use of Excel there is an inescapable fact, Excel is a great source of bottom up innovation and ideas from non programmers which we should endeavour to capture and not just forbid.

</comment><comment><USER42> The issues raised in this article are far less about failings of Excel but rather typical failures of business to plan long term and put effort/resources into comprehensive solutions.

</comment><comment><USER43> Don't blame Excel if your processes suck. Excel is a tool, namely a Swiss army knife to edit and present data that is commonly used in business. It can be very powerful if you know what you are doing.

<comment><USER44> Swiss army knife is a good analogy. Sure, it does lots of things, but if you want to do really big work, you'll probably want a chef's knife, or a saw, or a pair of scissors, not miniature versions of each designed to fit in a small package.

That said, it's a great tool to survive in the woods :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One reason why Excel should never be used for anything real is because it lacks type safety. For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry. There are lots of other problems related to type safety as well.

<comment><USER46> For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry.

There are ways around that. Here's something I just put together as an example:

=EXACT(COUNT(A2:A6),COUNTA(A2:A6))

That will only return true if all the cells in range A2:A6 contain numbers.

There are other approaches that would work, if that doesn't suit you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As the founder of my own startup, I'm forced to use Excel to do financial projection, etc, essentially all materials for my pitch deck. The only thing that worries me is accidentally doing something wrong without knowing what has changed -- stupid things like accidentally pressing Spacebar and Enter on an important cell. Because of this, I keep looking Undo just to make sure my last step is what I intended to do.

I use IntelliJ and Git, so you know what I'm missing.

</comment><comment><USER48> What should we use, then?

I desperately need some tool I can tell non-tech people to use where they can input arbitrary structured data.

After the data is there, in any format the user wants, as long as it is structured somehow, millions of programs can be written to use that data and combine it, but somehow the data has to be written FIRST. It is not feasible to come up with the schema, write a software based on that schema and then give it to the non-tech people.

<comment><USER27> Teach people how to use excel properly:

\- treat inputs and outputs separately

\- always use simple tables for input (no breaks, first lines are titles, basic vlookups for relationships, etc.)

\- use pivot tables to summarize the tables, and build reports on top of the pivot tables.

EDIT: BTW, on a personal level, I've moved to CSV/Jupyter Notebooks combo, but I have no hope that my fellow non-tech workers will do the same...

<comment><USER49> My current role is at a large company, and a significant portion of my work is getting Excel reports which are broken and fixing them. Most I've never seen working. Some reports have been broken for years but need to be resurrected.

To add a couple more:

\- Use actual tables. (Select data+headers, Insert -> Tables -> Table). In most cases the data is tabular but not formatted as a table. Making this one change makes the formulas self-documenting, and rather than selecting rows 2:5000, it will automatically accommodate more data as it's added. Tables can also be named (click in the table, Table Tools [Design] -> Properties -> Table Name). E.g. tbl_sales. This allows nice formulas like

        =SUM(tbl_sales[Sales])

or

        =SUMIF(tbl_sales[Region],"West",tbl_sales[Sales])

At a certain point, it really needs to be SQL, but between this and pivot tables you can greatly extend the time before a database is needed.

\- Add a sheet with instructions. Explain hiccups which may be encountered, and how to fix them.

\- Add comments to VBA. There is about 1 person at my facility (other than me) who adds any comments at all. Most use the Macro Recorder then add in the loops and logic as needed. Makes it really tough to figure out.

\- Protect cells which hold calculations. I recently saw a spreadsheet which has been giving sub-optimal output for _years_ because the ranges used in a function were messed up and copied down every week.

\- Use the built-in styles (Home -> Styles). Same goes for Word (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.). It makes spreadsheets way more straightforward to read if there are some cells using Explanatory, Input, and Note styles, and it's less abrasive to read. I particularly like the Input style because you can tell users "You'll only need to update the orange cells".

\- Use multi-line formulas. Alt+Enter while editing a cell allows multiple lines on a single formula. You can also improve the readability by adding four spaces at the start of the new lines. E.g.

        =SUMIFS(tbl_sales[Total_Sales],
            tbl_sales[Month], "Jan",
            tbl_sales[Region], "West")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "If I increase the page number, our sales go up. I'm on to something.."

[http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12](http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-12-12)

</comment><comment><USER51> While we're talking about Excel:

Are there any good tools available for version control and/or diffing of spreadsheets?

If my coworker updates a formula in cell E3 and emails it to be, is there any way for me to know what changed?

<comment><USER52> Spreadsheet Compare is built into Excel/Office. It's a relatively unknown tool since it came out in 2013.

See: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in- Spre...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spreadsheet- Compare-f2b20af8-a6d3-4780-8011-f15b3229f5d8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Find me a cloud database with a good GUI for read/write and I'll get off excel.

Databases are meant for tech stacks, not working with lists.

</comment><comment><USER54> Put simply, Excel is excellent as a terminal node in any data pipeline, but poor as an intermediate node. Open speadsheet -> human plays with data -> human makes decision = good. Open spreadsheet -> human plays with data -> automated process pulls data further along in data pipeline = bad.

</comment><comment><USER55> Like others said in here people like and use Excel because it is a flexible, visual, programming language. We haven't got alternative solutions for all the people who want to program like that. Instead more and more companies come up with very rigid, workflow based systems who actually haven't got the freedom Excel has. The only proper attempt in solving this problem has been made by people like Bret Victor but nothing commercialized at least as I am aware of. Accounting, finance and even data processing / analytics software companies still live in the Middle Ages in terms of user interactivity and flexibility which is why a lot of us resort to programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Excel just wasn't designed to do some of the heavy lifting that companies need to do in finance," said Paul Hammerman, a business applications analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.

The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE . This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training.

\---

reads like a "submarine

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment><comment><USER57> Python is my day job and I'm very fluent in the common data science tools like Pandas, but you'll hardly ever catch me using Pandas because Excel is just so much easier for 2d data.

The thing is, I never use Excel because the data I work with every day is almost always multidimensional, so I work with xarray[1]. It drives me crazy to see coworkers using Excel for things that it is _not_ suitable for and having crazy solutions like multiple tables per sheet, multiple sheets, multiple files or other hacks to describe another dimension of data.

[1] [http://xarray.pydata.org](http://xarray.pydata.org)

</comment><comment><USER58> I think "don't use Excel" is the wrong solution. The answer is to develop some clear metrics around when to migrate off Excel. We use some pretty big spreadsheets, and they're fine for the intended purpose.

</comment><comment><USER59> I was toying with this idea in the past, where cells would support, in addition to primitives(numbers, strings, whatever) and functions, a new type which would be identified by a reverse domain name notation path/key (e.g org.hr.employees.cnt), and optionally a comma separated (key-value) pairs as arguments.

Whenever a value for such a unique (key, arguments) cell would be required, the application would collect all such that need updates -- or, you could click a button to update them all --, create a message that would contain all paths and arguments, and auth info (each user would require to authenticate with some centralized system, so that the auth key would be used for that RPC, and that the service could check for authentication and authorization ), call out to some service and get values for each of those cells (value could depend on the authenticated user, or could even be denied depending on privileges ).

Furthermore, the application would cache each such cell value (auth key, resource path, arguments digest, value) and it would periodically update them, or do so on demand (so that you can use it say on a plane, and refresh them when you land). That's the gist of it, but there's more to it and there are some optimization opportunities I am ignoring here, but it could work.

Then again, for all I know, there are already such services, or apps that kind of do this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER60> Huh, I thought only TechCrunch was the advertising "news" secret arm of Silicon Valley investors? I didn't realize the WSJ did advertising "news" pieces also.

</comment><comment><USER61> After building a couple of years of financial systems, I have a hypothesis - if you could build a Jupyter Notebook with an editable spreadsheet view that is backed by a database and has something like Atom editor Teletype's CRDT (conflict free replicated data types) to enable collaboration...that would be an Excel killer.

Incidentally, there are a lot of people who move from Excel to Salesforce ! Because of the ability to program it like an Excel sheet.

</comment><comment><USER62> Pretty much every CRUD app I've ever written was to replace something that was already being done in Excel, and the reason was always to get more of one or more things a RDBMS gives you. So I can say this from a knowing place: good freaking luck replacing Excel's other capabilities. 30 years of work by thousands of Microsoft devs is not easily replaced. It's like a moat around their business that they built by brute force.

</comment><comment><USER63> Accountants invented spreadsheets. Programmers made electronic spreadsheet programs. The reason why spreadsheets are so popular among otherwise not technically people is because it was developed by business people over the course of centuries.

Unfortunately, if you're not technically inclined and someone gives you a big hammer, at a certain point you're gonna have to stop hammering everything you encounter and learn how to use a screwdriver.

</comment><comment><USER64> When I worked at a large investment bank we spent a ton of time and effort on a system that allowed equity analysts to use excel and sync their data back and forth to the firm's centralized system. it was a great approach because it kept the analysts happy, who were all masterful excel users and thus very efficient and happy with it.

Joel Spolsky's essay "Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy" comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER65> Something that almost always gets left out of these discussions is how quickly you can spin a new dataset into a highly polished, ready-to-print-for- executive-review report _IF YOU HAVE MASTERED EXCEL HOTKEYS_. For context, I have meaningful experience doing data analysis using various combinations of SQL, python, ruby, R/tidyverse, and excel with lightning-fast fingers. In a previous role, I regularly needed to summarize new datasets to executives, and I found that nothing was quicker and more flexible than the following workflow: copying and pasting raw data into an unformatted "data" sheet, creating a new sheet from a well-formatted template, and quickly writing whatever "SUMIFS" prototypes I needed then filling out the rest of the sheet by copying those formulas across cells.

Often excel users are stereotyped as having error-prone, sporadic workflows where they are often mistakenly writing over raw data, etc. And that is often a valid stereotype. However, I believe that there exist scenarios where excel is part of the optimal workflow.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm on the market for another startup idea and one of the most ubiquitous advice I'm hearing nowadays is that "there's a startup in every Excel sheet".

From that perspective WSJ is doing a great job in making the bed for these ideas: startups will eventually want to sell to those "Finance Chiefs" which is never an easy job.

<comment><USER67> I'm in London too, doing a bootstrapped Excel startup. See my profile for contact details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." -African Proverb

Desktop apps like Excel are fabulous at letting you work alone with data in front of you.

But they are a shitstorm of horror when you try to work with other people, collecting data from multiple places. And sure, Office 365 is a step in the right direction, but it's not nearly enough. Google Sheets is slightly better, but it's still not enough.

To be frank, the same way that "anyone can do SQL," we've fallen into a trap of thinking "anyone can do Excel," and it's just not true. And no amount of improving the commercial product Excel will make it work for businesses like they need, in my opinion.

At some point you need to hire engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, process engineers, business analysts, etc., to help you manage your data.

Asking people to "Learn Excel" in order to replace a real team of qualified domain experts is folly.

</comment><comment><USER69> Excel is remarkable, yes, but I'd argue that given its nature pretty much every reasonably complex workbook can be expected to have at least one bug. Having worked with them a lot in many different contexts, I've seen just how easily errors are introduced and I think they should never be used for research or finance where the cost of errors is high. At it's core the issue is that it's really hard to create variations and tests which can tell you if something is wrong... Much harder than it is to do this in a normal programming paradigm. Yes, the barrier to entry is lower, but the trade-off is much increased error rate and ongoing brittleness. Even if it's "right" at one point there's no guarantee it will be right in the future. What if someone copies/pastes data into a crucial worksheet and misses a column? It's so incredibly easy to screw up!

</comment><comment><USER70> This really sounds like another case of whats old is new again. In a way, I think it speaks a bit to the obsolecence of what used to be 'systems professionals' that things have swung so far into the end user domain.

If the finance team (and I have been part of one early in my career at a major conglomerate) is doing essentially the same repetitive analysis on periodic data sets, it is their bad for not reaching out to their systems people for a better way. Those types of reporting can be canned at a much earlier level and output generated/delivered in the desired format directly to the end users. And nothing precludes still making data available for new types of analysis.

Excel is great for small operations, ad hoc stuff and just quick and dirty work (a REPL of sorts as others have said). But not as a primary/crucial reporting tool for large operations.

</comment><comment><USER71> > "You're still going to use Excel for the things you're not using a tailored > solution for," he said.

I was shocked to hear about my old company still using Excel heavily for key business operations. I think those are the ones that should be replaced by bespoke software.

On the other hand what likely happens is you need a way to quickly perform some analytical task and your company doesn't have the process or speed to whip up some software quickly. After seeing how a lot of Fortune 500 companies work I'm not sure they ever will with compliance and other regulations in the way.

Excel is very accessible and will probably be the way businesses whip up analyses in the face of business fire-drills unless they have software engineers embedded in their teams or they get their current staff to learn how to code.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is everywhere. This is the reason I say that every company and organization, whether they realize it or not, needs software engineers. The things that grow (and they do grow rather than being built) in the absence of access to software engineers are overly complex and fragile.

<comment><USER73> Do software engineers want to work on these problems though? IME, we all love to work on problems one step higher than our current level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Have seen Excel derivatives pricers that ran long Monte Carlo simulations (yes, RAND() is often good enough) that took several minutes -- press F9 for a new estimate of a price, as well as simplified stripped-down pricers that got within 0.001% of our real internal pricing system but was nicely laid out and explainable to clients.

The only thing that Excel is awkward at is unlimited recursion. For everything else, if you can't turn your computation into a nicely laid-out spreadsheet, then you probably don't understand your problem well enough to explain to others.

Had a fun time doing many of the Euler problems in Excel, even though they theoretically many require recursion. Oftentimes I got the answer more quickly and easily than in Python.

</comment><comment><USER75> I used to be in the camp "oh you know Excel and PowerPoint, ahah!"

But working full time and having to create Excel spreadhseets on a regular basis as an engineer (mainly for budgeting and capacity plannig, but also do some schedule/timeline display), I have to say once you know how to cross reference things in Excel, life saver...

Automating spreadsheet creation has helped save hours of manual recompiling every quarter (do this Python is pretty pleasant). Yes. The scrolling and wrapping really sucks, but nonetheless everyone understands excels. I have been given tours and free trials from SaaS companies to try their AWS budgeting interface. They are great for some (like some prettt graph), but just not easy and flexible at all.

</comment><comment><USER76> "Keep checking plurals readers tell headline writers" springs to mind as a response!

But, joking aside, Excel is the most amazingly useful and adaptable tool but it's incredible how many obvious improvements have been left out. Parts of it are stuck in the stone age. As others have mentioned, version control and information flow are hugely limited with it and there's a real feeling that it went backwards for things like charting (I suspect it's partly that other methods are now more intuitive). And why on earth don't they do something (anything) to make pressing F1 not be such an annoying experience...

</comment><comment><USER77> Sounds more like they should get a proper ERP and/or HR system to solve this.

</comment><comment><USER78> Having read the article, I feel as if the headline is a bit misleading and clickbaity.

A more accurate headline in terms of the article's contents would be something like, "Stop Using Excel For ERP, CRM, And Workflow-Based Use Cases, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs". Or to be extra snarky, "Follow Known Best Practices, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs".

Not that attention should not be paid to the article's subject matter -- there is SO MUCH wood to chop in terms of helping enterprise customers run their companies better and/or get rid of inefficiency and general jankiness.

</comment><comment><USER79> _Shudder_

This reminds me of my 2 months working for a Big 4 accounting firm in, basically, SOX auditing.

We mapped out controls on our little 14" laptop screens using excel spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows and hundreds if not thousands of columns.

I'd say we were writing novels in Excel but, to be honest, there were probably far more words than the average novel contained.

Talk about using the wrong tool for the job -- and using low-paid monkeys on inadequate equipment rather than developing a proper application for the task (or paying someone else to do the same).

I'll never look at excel the same way again.

</comment><comment><USER80> As someone in a systems / ops engineering role it frustrates me endlessly when someone sends me information / data in the form of an excel spreadsheet or a word document.

My only are the applications slow and buggy (unless I'm guessing you're running Windows?) the file format is very hard to work with / from if you want to do anything with it outside the vendors application, data quickly becomes stale and it's not easy to populate automatically using standard tooling let alone share the information generated there from in an accessible, digestible format.

</comment><comment><USER81> How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?

<comment><USER48> what are they advertising?

<comment><USER82> "Instead, companies are turning to new, cloud-based technologies from Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc., Adaptive Insights and their competitors.

The newer software connects with existing accounting and enterprise resource management systems, including those made by Oracle Corp. or SAP SE. This lets accountants aggregate, analyze and report data on one unified platform, often without additional training.

Adobe switched to Anaplan early last year and many of the tasks previously performed in spreadsheets are now done in the system, maintaining "one source of truth," Mr. Garrett said."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Some time ago Telco carriers used to keep their plant assets data in Excel, PDF, Autocad, images, paper etc. I work for a company that does software to centralize all that info in a database. Once they start using the software the big issue is that they want to keep different versions of the same data all centralized. Sort of a version control system, the complexity of maintaining data integrity in such environment is massive. It is like they would like to return to a decentralized system where they can do whatever they want with their data.

</comment><comment><USER84> That's not happening.

There is currently simply no viable substitute. (And don't tell me LibreOffice). Excel's mindshare is off the charts in the finance world.

Even if LibreOffice was anywhere close - it wouldn't matter...the finance staff wants what they already know & since they approve the $$$ they usually get what they want.

For certain tasks other applications may be more suitable, but as a general swiss army knife it's here to stay

We use Google sheets at work too - almost exclusively for shared trackers though which don't require any serious functionality.

</comment><comment><USER39> This article appears to be about how senior leadership wants to pay people that are not financial analysts to create reports that can then somehow be used by financial analysts (probably after exporting to CSV so they can work in Excel?)

This sounds great if you know exactly what reports you need and have the resources to build them, but I'm not really sure how this kind of initiative means "stop using excel". This article is advocating for a solid API / data management / data catalog program from what I'm reading.

</comment><comment><USER85> In my enterprise, PowerBI, Flow, and Powerapps are the microsoft products helping to move data out of excel, or at least helping to make it visual and shareable.

If any of those products grows a more user friendly model for _thinking_ about how to do things (Flow is arguably the closest) they could revolutionise how things are done here. PowerBI has enormous power to express data as stories, but the technical hurdles are still high. It's not _harder_ than excel, but there's a competency cliff.

</comment><comment><USER86> One step forward to manage spreadsheets would be if there was a way to enforce relational database table looking sheets. I mean, you should be able to lock a sheet in a way that anything you enter to a column must be of same type, you can't addd random formulas wherever, but you need to add data one row at a time, if you miss primary key, no other changes are allowed, if you have a defined formula for a column, it is guaranteed to be the same in all data rows etc.

</comment><comment><USER87> >Kayla Davis, who runs financial planning at ABM Industries, relied on Excel to pull data from a motley of disparate accounting systems

"Motley of disparate accounting systems" is your problem, not Excel. Heavy Excel use/misuse by end analysts is a symptom of poor data practices, not a cause. If Excel is being used to compile and distribute complicated/big/important reports, it's extremely likely they lack better and more coherent tools and data sources.

</comment><comment><USER88> In our 150-people team as part of a 1,500 people company, we use a ton of Excel, but a significant part of our structured data is in [https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com), which I can't recommend high enough.

It combines the structured-ness of a database with the ease of use of a spreadsheet. And it lets you slowly evolve your datamodel (we adjust fields/tables every few months and it usually only takes 15 minutes).

</comment><comment><USER89> Sounds like their workflow is the problem, not their tool. I'm no shill for Excel, but it is without a doubt powerful and can be quite programmatic. Maybe Excel could get a plugin system like Atom or VS Code or Sublime that could handle integration with centralized platforms / databases.

Just wondering: can you make an API call / ORM query to a database from within Excel macros? How much I/O can you do with macros?

<comment><USER90> You can do basically anything I/O within an Excel macro (VBA script):

You can talk to a database: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba- new-databas...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18313899/vba-new-database- connection)

Interact with the filesystem: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse- text...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11528694/read-parse-text-file- line-by-line-in-vba)

Open arbitrary sockets, with some caveats: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock- winsock...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125921/mswinsock-winsock- event-handling-in-visualbasic)

And more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Doesn't excel allow using any data source for the data? So you can e.g populate a table from a web service/database etc?

The thing with excel is that it's repl-like and lets you sketch up a solution. If users could build more data driven apps (I don't doubt it's possible but it should be _easy_ ) like those Access popularized then you could start off using sketch data and finish with using a "single source of truth".

</comment><comment><USER92> There are things that Excel is good for and some that it's not. This article seems like it's blaming the tool instead of the people who are using it incorrectly.

Also I laughed when one of the complaints was "Older versions of Excel don't allow multiple users to collaborate on the same document". Well, is that Excel's fault, or should they just go and get the latest version?

<comment><USER93> IKR. And "On the other hand, older versions of Google Sheets, well, didn't exist"

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> I used to joke with my colleagues that you never have to write "Excel" in your CV :)

Now that I am grown up a bit, I recognize it can be useful. The real life problem, for me, is recognizing when comes the moment to stop sending spreadsheets by mail and write software, instead.

Or buy it. Lots of people buy sofware, they tell me. Why don't they feel the pleasure of crafting every single bit by themselves?

</comment><comment><USER95> In my experience the problem with Excel is it gets used as a database often because there are more Excel gurus than DB gurus. The Excel guru in my department had to update his version of Office to 64-bit and add RAM because our spreadsheets were getting too large. Even he admits that Excel isn't the best choice for this but we laid off all the Access/SQL people years ago.

</comment><comment><USER96> I don't think the article is suggesting stop using spreadsheets - it says some companies are adopting "cloud" based solutions that offer collaboration features and other tools.

Not sure if these cloud offerings have the same breadth of features that Excel has as I've never used them, but Workviva seems to be some sort of cloud based spreadsheet and analytics tool.

</comment><comment><USER97> I have produced thousands of reports in excel format in the financial services industry. If there were an easier api to just have an excel sheet pull/push data from/to a web service, this would be the best of both worlds.

The interface is very familiar for many professionals, its just a matter of coordinating and working off a the same data.

<comment><USER67> My side project does this by serverizing Excel sheets. Take a look at my profile for links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Shouldn't you be able to do the same thing R does with excel?

I mean at some point if you cannot teach everyone a programming language, you can at least give them some tool that can do a similar job.

Teaching programming is so expensive, the money has always been into making programming just easier and easier.

</comment><comment><USER99> They had me until the part where they complained about using old versions excel. Then upgrade it, and while you are at it upgrade your windows XP machines too. Why are these companies complaining about using old software when they are the ones who are always last to upgrade?

</comment><comment><USER100> The problem is very simple. Everybody understands how to sum cell A1 with cell B1 and have a result in cell C1. Summing arrays, though, like in an R dataframe, is much more difficult to understand. You don't see it and you need to train your brain to think in SQL terms.

</comment><comment><USER101> There are lots of great tools to solve the single source of truth problem. foe example, I've used Looker (which is connected to our data warehouse) to spit out JSON feeds or CSVs which excell and google sheets can live-import.

Doing this gives us the best of both worlds

</comment><comment><USER102> Deploying Excel in production is like deploying a beadboard in a piece of consumer electronics. You just give away too much control to keep your deployment robust. Having said that, Excel is an excellent tool - just not for everything under the sun!

</comment><comment><USER103> Paid advertising? I use LibreOffice and it fullfills all my needs.

I understand, there may ve different needs in big corporations, of course. But that doesn't mean "everyone should stop using Excel and buy our cloud SW", sigh.

</comment><comment><USER104> In the article, and in these comments, are people distinguishing between Excel and Google Sheets, or are they lumping them both together as "excel"? Where I work I don't think anyone uses Excel, but Google Sheets is common.

</comment><comment><USER105> I hate Excel, can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm a big Google sheets fan when it's used with their apps scripts. You can do a lot using the sheet as a data store combined with functional JavaScript.

<comment><USER106> Look, I hear you... I love Google Docs over Microsoft Word... and for simple things I like Google Sheets.

But given how much shit is in Excel, and how many edges cases have just been worked out already in Excel... man sometimes it's just nice to have Excel.

Want to de-dupe a list? There's a button for that in Excel. (I know there are tools... but look my point is just that it's so much easier in Excel.)

Want to convert some list of dates that were saved based on a 1904 calendar over? Easy, Excel even offers to do it when you paste. Google docs? Yeah not so much. You're left doing this by hand... 4 years and 1 day off... ugh.

Want to see all the formulas and know how they work? You get only so much visibility into the apps for Google Sheets... I don't really want to run code / grant access to things unless I know what they are doing. Not keen on adding 3rd party functionality that may be sending my data back to the mother ship.

I love me some Google Sheets... but just saying when I need to get shit done, Excel is usually a slightly more robust experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> "I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data."

That is literally all I did when I was a financial analyst and is how I became a programmer. This should be automatic, I thought.

</comment><comment><USER108> "[Microsoft] wouldn't comment on what share of [Office 365] customers are using the program for financial analysis and accounting.

Good, I would be concerned if they knew exactly what each customer was using their software for.

</comment><comment><USER109> I remember one IronPython book that made a spreadsheet application that allowed the user to use python itself for the spreadsheet functions. I think it was a great idea.

The software itself was available for download for a time.

<comment><USER110> There was a startup called Resolver Sytems pursuing this. They meanwhile abandoned it in favor of a different project but did open-source it: [https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible- spreadsheet](https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> We can use Excel as long as we are aware of its limits/loopholes e.g. [http://0.30000000000000004.com/](http://0.30000000000000004.com/)

</comment><comment><USER112> Sounds like misuse of excel rather than don't use it.. no mention of powerpivot , query tool or connections. also there is much more to consider when switching to a cloud solution.

</comment><comment><USER113> I worked at nPower, in MIS, they used to link about 16 spreadsheets together because they "didn't like" SQL. These are one of the UKs big six energy companies.

</comment><comment><USER114> One killer missing feature in Excel for me is proper UTF-8 support. Connect Excel to your db, save a csv file to import to your website and say goodbye to your umlauts!

</comment><comment><USER115> Why does this feel so much like sponsored content for Workiva?

</comment><comment><USER112> I think all the features he listed as reasons to switch away from excel are in excel. IMHO the issue there may be more training, process and good data management.

</comment><comment> robert-wallis It seems like using Google Sheets or the online Excel is the answer. Single source of truth, collaboration, and keep the same fundemental tools.

</comment><comment><USER116> Workiva's stock price has jump to an all time high after the wall street journal article. This is great news for them ;)

</comment><comment><USER117> This CFO should talk to CIO - before making such a blunt statement. So one silver bullet to solve all the problems.

</comment><comment><USER118> Feels like an ad

<comment><USER119> it's an add in deed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> This is just an ad for workiva, right?

</comment><comment><USER121> It's weird how no one can adopt office365 and online Excel like they can with Google sheets.

</comment><comment><USER122> No one has yet mentioned the shortcut keys, so I'll add this dimension.

When you show up to work on wall street, your new buddies will yank the mouse out of your machine and remove the F1 key. Then you can begin your apprenticeship with a fresh perspective.

The point is, you can be incredibly productive in excel against a very large problem space. It can't handle GB datasets, but once you have filtered down to a manageable size you can answer questions via ad-hoc analysis, automate financial reporting documents, solve multivariable regressions, run machine learning algorithms (see 'Data Smart') etc. with aplomb. I understand the objections to the data model and its inappropriate uses, but excel can take raw data from disparate sources to finished documentation for regulatory requirements and helps you automate most of that -- I don't think the finance industry is going to move away from it. I certainly don't perceive an understanding of the costs involved with building a different way.

>"I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," Mr. Garrett said

I hear this complaint all the time from business leadership, Mr. Garrett doesn't seem to understand that extracting/munging/preprocessing and then analyzing data is inextricable from the end product which is visibility and understanding at the business leader level. There isn't a follow-up to say Mr. Garret is hiring data engineers and software developers to serve the now- liberated 'data focusers'. I'm very skeptical that these sentiments are different than the past, or are a signal of changing times ahead.

Lastly, I'd to share the following funny snippet from the reprehensible though satirical leveraged sellout blog:

>I turned and tapped Josh on the shoulder to get his attention. I didn't say a word, but my face said "Yo…yeah you, McKposer." We locked eyes. I slowly and dramatically reached for my mouse cable. Staring him down, I methodically unplugged it from my computer's USB port. The cable came out slowly but smoothly and with it's final, climactic release, I heard Josh gulp with fear.

>I continued to glare at him as I started to "fly around." My eyeballs burned through his unweathered, 60-hour-a-week-when-he-should-have-done-90 face as I hid and unhid sheets and conditionally formatted and applied validation to cells with triple nested conditional and indirect functions and then culminated by on-the-fly writing a macro that took my data and made it into a Marimekko (and we don't even use that shit!). I never turned to look at the screen, and my eyes never left his.

</comment><comment><USER123> This story has less to do with Excel than it does having staff capable of using technology

</comment><comment><USER124> This article could have been written 20 years ago, and it probably was in some other form.

</comment><comment><USER125> This feels a lot like a submarine ad.

Also if this guy thinks he's going to escape silos by putting everything in the cloud, he's quite mistaken. The cloud is just code running somewhere else. It does not change fundamental computing paradigms.

</comment><comment><USER126> This sounds like an ad.

</comment><comment><USER127> Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics- pap...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers- contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel)

[https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily- chart-3)

 _he authors found that Microsoft Excel would often interpret "SEPT2", which corresponds to the gene Septin 2, as "September 2nd". The programme also tended to mistake identification codes like "2310009E13" for numbers in scientific notation—in this particular instance, the code would be read as 2.310009 times 101_

Excel is fine for the home user. But the _implicit_ conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis.

Plus, it's limited precision can cause errors such as subtractive cancellation, etc. In order to correctly calculate complex formulae, the calculations must be done with an understanding of the limitations of the computers.

e.g. you don't calculate (a^2-b^2) for large 'a' and 'b'. Instead, you calculate (a+b)*(a-b). That has the same mathematical result, but is not affected by subtractive cancellation.

<comment><USER128>
        > Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things

Good luck with that, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Many "non-trivial" applications got their start at someone's desk in the form of a shitty excel spreadsheet with horrific macros. Is it optimal for "complex analysis"? No, but it doesn't matter because most things are computationally simple. The hard part is the intricate business logic and the timeliness of getting results and these things are not "trivial" at all.

Instead of complaining about how terrible excel is, the community here should be providing alternatives. And no, engaging a software team/consultant for a million dollars to develop bespoke applications or interfaces to enterprise systems for every little project isn't a viable solution for people who need to get stuff done pronto.

A real alternative to Excel is no small feat.

<comment><USER129> I agree with that. Modern software development has version control, unit tests, package managers, etc. Ideally we get support for some of those concepts in something that feels like a spreadsheet to the end user. (I'm not sure if it could ever be retrofitted to Excel)

<comment><USER130> As others have said, you can get version control with Excel by saving the file the SharePoint.

Some huge financial spreadsheets have sanity checks computations. With conditional coloring (turn this cell red if the sanity check fails) these can feel a lot like unit tests. However, these are mostly for business logic - <USER3> it's hard to see how a vendor could provide them.

In other words, it's not that excel doesn't have version control and unit tests - it's that the people who wrote excel spreadsheet sheets don't understand version control or unit tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> Can anybody think of other examples of products or tools that fall into the category of: "many people use them, even though management tells them not to, because it helps them get stuff done."

I'm not a mechanic, but is WD40 an example? Or maybe some tool like a hand held circular saw, in home construction?

And, other examples from the tech world?

<comment><USER44> Trello. In the last few jobs I've had there's almost always been a developer who has their own personal to do list on a trello board, even if we had robust tracking systems like jira and rally.

<comment><USER96> Is that such a bad thing though?

Having tickets in JIRA is for the team to track and plan work that needs to be done, not for storing personal garbage.

<comment><USER44> No, but in smaller groups, it's been a tool to get things organized for teams, then big ERP rollouts happen and managers start saying "stop using trello, use this instead".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> I thought the spreadsheet revolutionized accounting in the 80's, not specifically Excel.

My dad brought home an IBM PC in 82, using Multiplan for chemical mixing calculations. He thought it was the cat's meow. Though Multiplan was the predecessor to Excel, the spreadsheet had been out since late 70's.

</comment><comment><USER133> This is just an ad for the cloud services they mentioned. Suits whining about not having _absolute_ control over every scrap of information is not news.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why does a powerful Excel alternative like [https://calculist.io/](https://calculist.io/) (that is not a spreadsheet) and others don't get much attention?

</comment><comment><USER134> "Tell Staffs" really I am a dyslexic and even I wouldn't make such a trivial mistake with plural /singular.

<comment><USER135> The CFO of a company tells the staff of the company to stop using Excel; the CFOs of several companies tell the staffs of those companies to stop using Excel.

<comment><USER134> no its not

Several CEO's (plural) tell their Staff (singular ) a CEO only has one set of employees.

The headline implies that all the CEO's have multiple sets of staff

<comment><USER135> If the headline said that CFOs love their wifes, would that imply polygamy?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your experience with cheaper s3 clones on the market excluding? - <AUTHOR>

So basically i want something like s3, just cheaper. 2 companies that i know of are :
http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/
http://www.constant.com/cloud/storage/
 Exluding azure,google,hp,rackspace who all have nearly the same pricing.My usecase is for video and photo storage and serving. Thanks <comment><USER2> There's also Google Cloud Storage which is cheaper per gigabyte (I think).

Amazon S3 costs $0.125/GB where as Google charges $0.12/GB.

And Google's integrates well with their App Engine and Cloud DB options.

(Correct me if I'm wrong.)

<comment><AUTHOR> And rackspace + azure should have nearly the same pricing. But comparing to the two i listed, they have 1/2 pricing,although the pricing goes nearly the same after 500TB storage (reduced redundancy) and 150TB bandwidth which is alot.</comment></comment>


Online Typing Practice for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.speedcoder.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> I recently realized (when pair-programming) that I spend a rather obnoxious amount of time dealing with the fallout from typos. I have known how to touch- type since school, but this was only good for the non-symbolic keys, omitting the parentheses, bars, etc. we programmers use for syntax. I started using this site (and another similar one: [https://typing.io/](https://typing.io/)) and after two weeks, I've already noticed a reduction in errors — and a big improvement in getting VIM to do my bidding. I feel this is one of those areas where a small investment in training (say 12 hours lifetime total) has a big pay-off, so I wanted to share.</comment>


Why content goes Viral? - <AUTHOR> http://www.adpushup.com/blog/content-goes-viral/

<comment><USER2> Yea, Upworthy uses pretty much all these tricks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly headlines play the biggest role here.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Headlines are actually the grabber in any content you post. What helps people to join your community is engaging and pertinent content -- this is difficult. If you just want randos visiting your site to pump up your metrics, you can rely on cheap tricks.

<comment><USER5> The issue arises when headlines' influence is in an order of magnitude.

At that point, even if you convert 3x less to your community, it's still worth it.

3000 visitors ---- 300 members (10%) 100 visitors ---- 20 members (20%)

I think that's what keeps aggregators afloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "This one cool trick about viral content may make you angry. But the last minute will make you cry."</comment>


Redis-V8 - <AUTHOR> http://redis-v8.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey guys, i am a author, as you can see project in alpha state... Everything is working, but i need some time for translate the docs/tutorials, with my english this can take a lot of time... If some one can help me with it, i will be happy.

<comment><USER3> Hi, just nipticking: you wrote

> Google Chrome, the open source browser from Google.

Google Chrome is _proprietary software_. Chromium is open source.

<comment><USER4> Yep, Chrome itself is not open source:

 _License: Freeware under Google Chrome Terms of Service_

 _Chrome 's WebKit & Blink layout engines and its V8 JavaScript engine are each free and open-source software, while its other components are each either open-source or proprietary. However, section 9 of Google Chrome's Terms of Service designates the whole package - Chrome itself - as proprietary freeware._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would I choose to use JS in a DB? Why, oh why? This language has more quirks then a 2012 US Republican Presidential candidate.

<comment><USER2> 1) JS is easy, almost everyone can work with it. 2) V8 is faster than LUA 5-10 times........ 3) MVC - Model and crons, i think should be in DB.

<comment><USER6> You know what's faster than JS? C. C, the language many VMs are built in and tasked with running these kinds of things.

<comment><USER7> And ASM is faster than C.

Javascript strikes a nice balance between performance and high level usability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The docs look Russian and the Author page is Lipsum :P [http://redis-v8.com/author/](http://redis-v8.com/author/)

Looks like a very early post :)

It sounds like he used V8 to replace redis's network stack? Doesn't make much sense to me, but maybe someone can explain why this is awesome :)

<comment><USER9> It is an extension of Redis that makes DB scripting in JavaScript possible, as far as I understand.

<comment><USER2> Uliy, call me please

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is probably unrelated, but why do people use non-monospaced fonts in code examples on their webpage? (in this case Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif)

It seems like this anti-pattern gained a lot of popularity lately.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's wrong with Lua when the task at hand is writing small scripts mostly putting together a few Redis primitives?

<comment><USER12> Because the tendency of most new developers is to learn one language and attempt to use it in all cases, even if it is not an optimal application.

I used to see this pattern in VB and later .NET developers, where even when another language or platform would make a task easier or more efficient, they would attempt to hammer out something workable in the one tool they knew, and actively refused (or campaigned) against alternatives.

JavaScript is the new VB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was submitted way too early (some of the pages are still "lorem ipsum" placeholders), but it's still cool. Looks like the author is basically using V8 to script Redis, similar to how Lua can be used [1] to script it already.

[1]: [http://redis.io/commands#scripting](http://redis.io/commands#scripting)

<comment><USER2> Yep, you are absolutely right. Every one can do that, no needs to be a genius NoSQL programmer or something =), if you want to migrate from SQL solutions, i think redis-v8 can help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well I'll inform the author that his project got here. And I'll ask him about its purpose.

<comment><USER2> I am there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm intrigue, how does it deal with V8 settings? js-flags command? or a different config file?

In particular, I'm thinking of V8_MAX_SEMISPACE_SIZE setting. If you cannot change this, then redis-V8 can only store max 1.4GB of data.

</comment><comment><USER16> Correct me if I'm wrong - looks like it can be used as a desktop document DB?

That'll be very very cool, since MongoDB gives up 32bit systems.

And I wish it'll support Windows.

</comment><comment><USER17> Submitted too early? The quickstart page is still in Cyrillic.

<comment><USER18> Nitpick, but it's not in Cyrillic, the same way your comment (and mine) is not in Latin or Roman. It's in Russian.

<comment><USER17> I can't read Cyrillic and my Russian writing recognition skills aren't very good either. The language could just as easily have been Montenegrin or Slavonic, I have no way of knowing. And yes, our comments are in Latin/Roman script.

<comment><USER18> What, the big "Translate from Russian?" bar didn't give it away? :p

<comment><USER17> I don't use Google Chrome/Chromium. My browser has no such bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Redis-v8 quick-start is now in English.</comment>


Who is More Persuasive: Jennifer Aniston or Data? - <AUTHOR> http://www.caycon.com/blog/2011/03/who-is-more-persuasive-jennifer-aniston-or-data/ <comment><USER2> Just so you know, before clicking on the link, it's just an online commercial about yet another bottled water product.

I thought she'd step in and make a point about how she could convince us that water is a precious resource, joking that she didn't need any data to back up her claim because she's just too hot for data.

Nope. Nothing like that. Just a mindless commercial, trying to be funny with self-references to being viral and all. Jennifer Aniston is hot, though ... so maybe it's worth watching. =)

</comment><comment><USER3> I must admit I was disappoint - from the title I thought it was this Data: <http://i.imgur.com/K98eL.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER4> First video seems to be down, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc47LcvIxyI></comment>


The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-strange-brands-in-your-instagram-feed/550136/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> As a backend dev that knows almost nothing about this, I thought the article was a pretty good intro into the world of content marketing, dropshipping, and Facebook/Instagram advertising.</comment>


5 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should get Married - <AUTHOR> http://www.fernstrategy.com/?p=241 <comment><USER2> This article could be titled '5 Reasons Why Every Person Should Get Married'. None of those benefits are specific to entrepreneurs. And marriage clearly isn't for every person, nor does every marriage offer all of those benefits. In fact, I would say a _vast_ majority of marriages don't even bat .400 on that list. I'm not being cynical here; my marriage is terrific, but I'm also pretty sure we're in the minority.</comment>


Nixie is a wearable camera that can fly. What u think? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gadgethunt.club/posts/fJKTvSTgxR8o6u89J

<comment><USER2> Please just link to [http://flynixie.com/](http://flynixie.com/) with a proper title. Your link to a post on gadgethunt.club (which seems to be your website) adds no additional value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand, but I think it adds tons of value. If people are interested in Nixie, some of them are probably also interested in Gadget Hunt.

<comment><USER3> Adds value for you, not HN.</comment></comment></comment>


Why one email app went to war with Apple–and why neither one is right - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/why-one-email-app-went-to-war-with-apple-and-why-neither-one-is-right/ <comment><USER2> Interesting point. I feel that dismissing the whole thing as a "lack of transparency" issue is a bit too simple though.

It might not be "illegal" but it is not farfetched that they are abusing they power position. Sure is their platform but we sometimes forget that it represents some 1.5B devices. As also other cases point out the 30% tax, which for a small firm is _money_ , is not the only unfair practice. Different set of APIs for their apps and everyone else's is another important thing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good discussion in the article comments as well, worth a read.</comment>


To aspiring developers: "Look at my app," a quick how-to - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tiny-design/to-aspiring-developers-look-at-my-app-a-quick-how-to-8e489d02d546#.ucg3wmsq5 <comment><USER2> Excellent practical advice...</comment>


Does CEO of a tech company need to know programming? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelstech.cn/article/1372675143_Does_CEO_of_a_tech_company_need_to_know_programming_

<comment><USER2> He will be respected by his technical employees if he does. Its not compulsory though.</comment>


Provider of Personal Finance Tools Tracks Cards, Sells Data to Investors (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/provider-of-personal-finance-tools-tracks-bank-cards-sells-data-to-investors-1438914620 <comment><USER2> I don't think the most valuable part is trying to re-identify transactions down to users.. that would probably open a can of worms that has all kinds of liability involved.

That said, if you could look at it in aggregate, that makes sense and could be immensely valuable. When a pair of fraud researchers from Capital One made $2.8M in three years by looking at _aggregate_ data and buying stocks based on it, I was only surprised it didn't happen earlier:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-23/capital-o...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-23/capital- one-fraud-researchers-may-also-have-done-some-fraud)

And then suddenly Yodlee, Mint, and the others made even more sense once they have scale..

 _(To be clear, this appears to be a form of insider trading and the two guys were prosecuted so probably not a plan to emulate.)_

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth posting the response that Yodlee made[0], but essentially it says that Yodlee does give information to a few companies that use it for analytics purposes, in a form that's "de-identified" and scrubbed of PII. The response goes to lengths to say that the information has been scrubbed of any PII and in every point made in the bullet list, it talks about that specific point. While I don't doubt this, I do doubt that it's not impossible to de-anonymize the data, which is the more important part; it doesn't matter if a company hasn't done it or there is no proof that a company doesn't do it, it matters if it's possible because Yodlee could be breached and that information could then be used in ways that companies that are legally bound to agreements not to do it can't/don't. Just because the "good guys" don't do something doesn't mean it's not possible and that it'll never happen.

On a side note, it feels like the response wasn't proof read very well because there are quite a few glaring typos and issues. Someone at the company couldn't have given it a better review before posting, or reviewed it as they were adding the addendum?

0: [https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee-responds/](https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee- responds/)

<comment><USER4> The response in no way addresses why Yodlee is so amazingly duplicitous.

Look at how Yodlee collects the data:

       Yodlee begins collecting transaction data from bank customers after they
       sign up to use online tools powered by Yodlee.

       Some information also goes to Yodlee through a practice called "screen
       scraping." If a person uses a budgeting app created by Yodlee and gives the
       app permission to access their bank accounts using their username and
       password, Yodlee can capture the transaction history in those accounts.

How much do you want to bet the vast majority of those customers have (1) no idea Yodlee is doing this, (2) were informed in only the most oblique way hidden in pages of legal text, and (3) would not be enthused about this if they knew.

<comment><USER5> Presumably people who want their budgeting app know it needs this data to do the job. I'm a user of their Money Center product and it is a great way to see my finances at my finger tips and has way better reporting than Mint who also presumably does similar things and pushes a ton of affiliate offers.

<comment><USER4> Right, showing a budget obviously can't be accomplished without reselling the data to hedge funds, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is old news. Channel checks is one use of this data and it's nothing new.

[http://www.integrity-research.com/are-channel-checks- legit/](http://www.integrity-research.com/are-channel-checks-legit/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is literally a year old, and the response has been posted here more than once: [https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee- responds/](https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee-responds/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a 2015 piece, so old news. Can we note that in the headline?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies - I wasn't sure of the standard procedure for adding dates in the headline (I've seen them added to posts ad-hoc and wasn't sure if they were added by the mods etc if they made the front page). Would be happy to edit but I just realised I can't edit the post's title - what would be the best way to rectify in this situation? Cheers.</comment></comment>


Wasn't The Patriot Act Supposed To Be About Stopping Terrorism? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110908/02534215846/wasnt-patriot-act-supposed-to-be-about-stopping-terrorism.shtml

<comment><USER2> This blog, and the blog it is sourced on, are both based on this NY Magazine article, where the graph is sized to fit on a screen and not fuzzy: <http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/></comment>


Going "GREEN" with the world's most powerful engine - <AUTHOR>

With all this talk about going green and renewable energy, is there a way for us to develop a way to harness the power of the worlds most powerful engine, the search engine, via the form of search hits or ad clicks (cpm, cpc, cpa, ppc), to create energy, or at least renewable energy credits through strategic partnerships with power companies, the companies placing the ads and getting the search hits, and a search engine.  Or could the concept be presented as a game and/or mobile app?  Think of what Lil Green Patch (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7629233915) has been able to accomplish for saving the rain forest via their facebook game application.  Im working on some creative ideas.  If you'd like to partner up, contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com.  Programmers, Electrical Engineers, those working with firms that handle online ads, and whomever else has any constructive criticism, welcome.  What do you think.  Please give your opinions and ideas. <comment><USER2> With all this talk about going green and renewable energy, is there a way for us to develop a way to harness the power of the worlds most powerful engine, the search engine, via the form of search hits or ad clicks (cpm, cpc, cpa, ppc), to create energy, or at least renewable energy credits through strategic partnerships with power companies, the companies placing the ads and getting the search hits, and a search engine.

Or could the concept be presented as a game and/or mobile app?

Think of what Lil Green Patch (<http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7629233915>) has been able to accomplish for saving the rain forest via their facebook game application.

Im working on some creative ideas.

If you'd like to partner up, contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

Programmers, Electrical Engineers, those working with firms that handle online ads, and whomever else has any constructive criticism, welcome.

What do you think? Please give your opinions and ideas.</comment>


Would You Turn Down a $100 Million Buyout Offer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/news/articles/201109/why-turn-down-a-100-million-dollar-buyout.html

<comment><USER2> _Morin launched Path, a smaller social network, in November, 2010. In December, Google offered him a $100 million buyout, plus a $25 million earn out over four years._

That's quite impressive for such a short time. Does anyone know what they had that was so desirable after so little time?</comment>


Show HN: No more batch image resizing - <AUTHOR> http://cloudresize.com

<comment><USER2> Cool service but it's not available yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! The service is not available yet, but feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to get noticed when we launch.</comment></comment>


Don't Reverse FriendFeed. Ditch it. - <AUTHOR> http://unalone.net/2008/09/dont-reverse-friendfeed-ditch-it/

<comment><USER2> I agree, there just isn't a need for a reverse friendfeed. I think, on average, people have 2-3 services listed on FF, and they usually don't overlap. It sometimes makes sense (post a tweet after a blog post), but do we need a whole service for that?

</comment><comment><USER3> While simplfying makes things easier, to simply say "don't use these services" doesn't solve the problem. You still have to interact with people on other services. "Oh I'm sorry. I look down on my friend's social network" just isn't always a solution. As soon as someone in your real-world socialnet posts something on some site you don't use, and you'll be forced to start using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I'm not. I usually hold fast to the sites I like using, and refuse to move. It forces other people to stick to my game - IF they care about my seeing what they do. Often they don't, and when that's the case neither of us really cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> hey hey, what's with the hey hey hey onomatopoeia hey hey obsession?

I'm all for informal writing styles, but those hey hey hey's really got on my nerves.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen a LOT of pro-FriendFeed anti-Facebook writing recently, the idea being that if you stalk people you don't KNOW that it makes it better or something. And I think that Facebook in many ways is the solution to what people use FriendFeed for.

I also, um, like getting on people's nerves. I'm sorry. :-(</comment></comment>


Simply plan your next day. That's how I finished my app - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-learned/12118a687d76

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of another article from a while back which advocated 6 items in decreasing priority.

        1 -> big item
        2 -> medium item
        2 -> medium item
        3 -> small item
        3 -> small item
        3 -> small item

I can't remember anything specific enough to find it, though.

Either could be beneficial, and choosing only the next three at first may be a good way of forming a habit.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is more interesting when you got to discuss with the person you are working with before setting the priority.

I work with my wife to set the priorities since she also helps me building the apps. Sometimes there are arguments :) but it's worth having one, you get more serious in getting things done that way..</comment></comment>


Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014794

<comment><AUTHOR> Fryer & Levitt 2007 discussion: [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/09/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/09/the- ku-klux-kla.html) l excerpts: [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/2wsM7WYk...](https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/2wsM7WYkMQ5)</comment>


What is a PhD Really Worth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110421/full/nj7343-381a.html

<comment><USER2> 1\. You learn how to think rigorously about complex ideas in graduate school. Believe it or not, that is valuable in any career.

2\. You are free to work on projects that are ridiculously ambitious in graduate school. Show me a VC willing to fund a (tech-sector) project with a ten-year R&D cycle (actually, if you're out there, contact me!)

3\. The academic culture is quite nice for folks of a naturally intellectual persuasion. The business culture is rife with lax ethical practices and hand- wavy belief systems that, for a certain type of person, can be draining to deal with. Academia has some of this, but its not even close to being of comparable magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr - we learn how to get by with less...

Thanks Nature, I'm glad that the main value you see in our spending 4+ years in advanced scientific study amounts to building a healthy respect for free food.

In pure economic terms, yes, the PhD seems almost always the wrong option. I'm curious about other factors such as general wellbeing and quality of life. Though chasing nonexistent tenure track positions while hopping from postdoc to postdoc probably isn't all that great.. Straight to industry for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> You don't get a Ph.D. for the money...everyone knows that. You get it so you can be a professional researcher (if that is in fact what you want).</comment>


Drawing and animating with music sequencers - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU4GJgwDCbQ

<comment> hello-trolls like</comment>