The Importance of Excel (commentary)

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/

This article is a nice summary of the advantages and pitfalls of Excel by James Kwak.  It focuses on the financial world, but the lessons could apply anywhere.  It’s not going to solve any problems, but it’s still a good reminder of things to look out for when using a tool like Microsoft Excel.  This article is part of my recent idea to save short articles for later when I have some quiet time.

I have to admit I use a spreadsheet all the time for various debugging needs.  I can store some calculated data, summaries, grouping, etc.  I recently used it to prototype a simple algorithm I needed to build an Android app.  It turned out that my original "this is perfect" algorithm fell flat on its face when I decided to piece it together in Excel and ran a bunch of numbers through it (Fill-Down is SO powerful).  I'm glad I decided to try it out there before discovering there was a problem after building the app itself.

I've also seen the dark side of using a spreadsheet for important work.  The article mentions it and I have to agree, I think every SAP project I've ever been on has some component of it dedicated to getting data out of SAP and into a spreadsheet. 

One SAP project I was on I had to create a long list of macros in Excel (VBA: Visual Basic for Applications) to achieve a task.  As I propped up more parts of the application, the more I had to rework the functionality into easy to digest functions with tons of in-line documentation.  You can find lots of articles stating your code should document itself without lots of comments, but I assure you when you are a consultant on a project who is going to hand an application to someone not as technically skillful, your only hope is that they will ramp-up slowly by reading your over-documented functions.

Anyway, my write-up is almost as long as the article itself!  If I were to say anything constructive, and really I'm nitpicking, but I feel he takes unnecessary stabs at Microsoft software as if trying to appease some underground software zealots.

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/