Comment on $16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.

silverhand@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• agelord@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Is it powerful? Yes

  Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No

  Are the “powerful” features intuitive to new users? Also no.

  Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job

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• BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.

  Youre right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its any good or not. You can have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess… Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could EB highly efficient.

  Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.

  Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it’ll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.

  abuse means incorrect use here.

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• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Excel is a powerful tool.

  You typoed ‘popular’?

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• endofline@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  It’s not… Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ), limits in columns and records, ever changing formats across versions… You asking for a disaster to happen which happens very often

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  • silverhand@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ) You can literally label ranges to use them as variables in Excel formulae, not to mention Excel Tables has more operations and features than you’ll ever need.

    limits in columns and records Unless you are working with an unfiltered, un-aggregated ledger dump straight out of your database (in which case you shouldn’t be let anywhere near an office computer), it’s rather hard to cross 1M+ rows and 16.4k columns in corporate finance.

    ever changing formats across versions The .xlsx format was introduced in 2007 (18 years ago) and hasn’t changed since. Not to mention you can still use all kinds of plaintext formats whenever you want.

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    • endofline@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it :-) About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?

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      • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Would you like this in excel formula, VBA, or python?

        It can be done in all. You’re only proving the other poster’s point. Excel isn’t necessarily the best option for tech literate people but given the tech illiteracy of many offices, it isn’t surprising they use excel for stuff like this.

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      • silverhand@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it :-)

        I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.

        About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?

        =OFFSET(range_name, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9) where range_name is the label given to the whole table.

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