A counter point to this is that spreadsheets bottle-neck the sharing of data and introduce data cleaning issues.
Most spreadsheets are built with the mindset that it is the end of the dataflow. However, at some point, this data needs to be shared forward. This might not be the original intention, but the more important the report is, the more important downstream use-cases become.
This is when spreadsheets become problematic. One can say that it's the owner's job to keep it compatible, but thinking of keeping it compatible isn't what normal spreadsheet users do.
Some issues I've seen:
* One can add a column easily/ rename it. This breaks any data sharing because now, downstream reports break. (In many cases, the data could have been added as a row instead of a column (new status code, etc.)
* Data-types are not enforced. Nothing prevents entering text into what should be a number or even create a completely new status code. Again, automation downstream breaks.
* Important info is usually not included. The spreadsheet is the latest representation of the data, so in many cases, attributes like the time-period (because it's implied) and unique identifiers (skus most frequently) aren't included.
* Maintaining compatible dimensions across different domains is not a priority for a spreadsheet owner. Finance may group countries differently than Supply-chain, which means they'll always see different numbers and argue that their number is correct.
Source: work at a Fortune 500 company, that has way too many excel reports (with critical performance metrics) and combining them to get an accurate view of the company performance is very labor-intensive and error-prone.
Now that Paperless-NG seems to be going unmaintained (last commit on 15th Sep 2021), Paperless-NGX has been created with a focus on an org, so that the continuity of the project can be maintained with a simple path for the original creators to join back if they want to.
I don't think the community could have handled this better!
Most spreadsheets are built with the mindset that it is the end of the dataflow. However, at some point, this data needs to be shared forward. This might not be the original intention, but the more important the report is, the more important downstream use-cases become.
This is when spreadsheets become problematic. One can say that it's the owner's job to keep it compatible, but thinking of keeping it compatible isn't what normal spreadsheet users do.
Some issues I've seen:
* One can add a column easily/ rename it. This breaks any data sharing because now, downstream reports break. (In many cases, the data could have been added as a row instead of a column (new status code, etc.)
* Data-types are not enforced. Nothing prevents entering text into what should be a number or even create a completely new status code. Again, automation downstream breaks.
* Important info is usually not included. The spreadsheet is the latest representation of the data, so in many cases, attributes like the time-period (because it's implied) and unique identifiers (skus most frequently) aren't included.
* Maintaining compatible dimensions across different domains is not a priority for a spreadsheet owner. Finance may group countries differently than Supply-chain, which means they'll always see different numbers and argue that their number is correct.
Source: work at a Fortune 500 company, that has way too many excel reports (with critical performance metrics) and combining them to get an accurate view of the company performance is very labor-intensive and error-prone.