this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
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
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. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.
You're r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also 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 be 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.
You typoed 'popular'?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.
=OFFSET(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell.