3 Reasons Why Replacing Microsoft Excel Is Worth Money to a Boss(forbes.com)
forbes.com
3 Reasons Why Replacing Microsoft Excel Is Worth Money to a Boss
https://www.forbes.com/sites/metabrown/2017/12/31/3-reasons-why-replacing-microsoft-excel-is-worth-money-to-a-boss/#66b5020a37a9
10 comments
Most of the problems listed in the article are just side-effects of spreadsheets in general (e.g. have to make formulas, build the sheet, add notes, etc) and aren't just specific to Excel. The same also applies to Numbers, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets. In this regard, the author's point doesn't really stand.
Excel may be the most widely used spreadsheet software (going by estimation, don't quote me on this), but it is far from perfect. There are plenty of annoyances I've found while using Excel, and have actually enjoyed using Google Sheets a lot to remedy some of them. The problem I see is that people in business are ingrained with using Excel since it's what they have always used. Excel is to corporations what the Ford F-150 is to America. Part of this is thanks to .xls and .xlsx files. Unless there is fully-compatibility support to seamlessly open these files in other software, it's a huge pain in the ass to deal with inconsistencies and formatting from conversions (ex. transferring from Excel to Google Sheets or vica versa). There is no widely used open spreadsheet file standard (Yea, there's CSV/TSV, but how many business people or non-analysts save their spreadsheets as those filetypes when emailing them around), which really sucks when the potential for something better than Excel is apparent if it could actually reach critical mass.
Excel may be the most widely used spreadsheet software (going by estimation, don't quote me on this), but it is far from perfect. There are plenty of annoyances I've found while using Excel, and have actually enjoyed using Google Sheets a lot to remedy some of them. The problem I see is that people in business are ingrained with using Excel since it's what they have always used. Excel is to corporations what the Ford F-150 is to America. Part of this is thanks to .xls and .xlsx files. Unless there is fully-compatibility support to seamlessly open these files in other software, it's a huge pain in the ass to deal with inconsistencies and formatting from conversions (ex. transferring from Excel to Google Sheets or vica versa). There is no widely used open spreadsheet file standard (Yea, there's CSV/TSV, but how many business people or non-analysts save their spreadsheets as those filetypes when emailing them around), which really sucks when the potential for something better than Excel is apparent if it could actually reach critical mass.
At my current workplace we have a few workbooks that need to be updated any time that our customer provides us with an update to them. Unfortunately they never tell us what changed so we have to go through and redo all the changes that we did previously and apply them to the new workbook. Then we have to test if we didn't mess something up in the migration and whatnot; all in all it takes upwards of a month between managerial overhead and the time it takes to actually figure out where something got messed up. And there's no good diff tool for excel documents which makes it incredibly frustrating to try and find what one cell might be wrong between a working document and an incorrect document. And then VBA for macros is basically impossible to understand because any googling for it returns results for every other version of VB with slight differences that don't work in Excel.
Here are some links that may help solve your problems.
Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-version...
Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mic...
Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-version...
Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mic...
Those would be great solutions but we're stuck on Excel 2007 and can't install any newer versions or basically any software because of IT reasons.
Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some modest sanity checks.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007...
This all sounds like it could be done more efficiently while still using excel. It should be possible to refactoring the sheets so that you can just copy past or write tailored tool to compare cells.
I don't normally use Excel, or any of the other Office tools, and I constantly argue my boss about the drawbacks I see with using them. The result is always the same: "It's what everybody knows how to use".
Then, what I hate the most, I have to sit while they struggle to position some object pixel perfectly in PowerPoint, or make the index numbers correct in any Word list, or have to explain why Excel show rounding errors, etc.
Then, what I hate the most, I have to sit while they struggle to position some object pixel perfectly in PowerPoint, or make the index numbers correct in any Word list, or have to explain why Excel show rounding errors, etc.
The problem is that excel is supremely flexible. You can do accounting, budgeting, inventory, reporting, forecasting, graphing, etc for a small to medium business from the same piece of software using basic formulas. I work at a small business and sometimes our specialized tools limit us in some of those areas, when you just want the ability to dump the raw data into excel (easily) and do a simple formula calculation.