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179

$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet. (www.theregister.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP

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[–] silverhand@reddthat.com 18 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[+] endofline@lemmy.ca -8 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

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?

[–] nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 9 hours 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.

[–] silverhand@reddthat.com 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours 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(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7) where range_name is the label given to the whole table and first_cell is its first cell.