$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.
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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
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
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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.
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.
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For a non-joke answer. ERP in this context means Enterprise Resource Planning. It basically allows you to do everything an enterprise requires with one software system instead of using several different ones.
Ta, I was curious.
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Excel or not, they should be using backups.
'Why do we need a backup when we have a RAID?"
The accounting head when you try to explain that your backup systems are woefully insufficient.
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Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable 'features' (can't even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I'm not the only person on the company.
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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)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell.Such a weird argument that you've responding to, as the answer (as you provided) is so easy and well known.
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
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Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
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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.
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
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Setting up an ERP can also be completely botched if the company's representatives don't fully grasp all the functions needed. What I've been going through as a customer of an ERP suite is that the "stars" of the software don't actually understand the other 50% of functions outside their department. That remaining 50% is distributed among 4 other departments, so representation wasn't exactly prioritized. Add in high turnover circa 2021 and the whole thing is logistical nightmare that finally at least has a goal in sight.
The other underlying issue is the existing forms usually lack what we need and have too much fluff. Once our ERP partner modifies it, the ERP developer drops all support for that form. We get zero help when it gets mystery glitches.
So yeah, I can get why some places say fuck it and stick with excel. Half the workforce knows excel well enough to write what they need. Take 10% of them to format and lock down spreadsheets so the other 50% of the workforce can just fill in boxes and pick drop downs. It just works.
All that to say, I both expect more form a Healthcare company but also am not surprised.
Yeah, the requirements should also be clear - or at least clear before any sort of implementation starts. Defining the requirements is a large part of what our consultants do and the more experienced ones know how to ask questions to get perspectives of people other than the "stars". Takes months usually to get things to where us developers can get started on anything. We've built some hella cool shit for some customers but then you look at the git history and realize that it took the customer over a YEAR to go live. They must've easily invested six figures getting this ERP just right for their needs. Automatic imports from other software they use, lots of customizations, including some brand new in-erp apps. They're loving it so far. But you don't get this without considering a bunch of people's needs.
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SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
Lol my company has a "no sort" policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.
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Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I'm not the only person on the company.
Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn't work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I'll have to keep this in mind.
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Lol my company has a "no sort" policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.
Can you not export to excel? Tbh Im new to it and it is so all encompassing I am basically lurking around outside
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Can you not export to excel? Tbh Im new to it and it is so all encompassing I am basically lurking around outside
You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it'll kill almost all the useful information. We've got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It's an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
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You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it'll kill almost all the useful information. We've got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It's an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
Oh god, my training has been trial and error
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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
To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
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You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it'll kill almost all the useful information. We've got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It's an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
Surely it would be cheaper to hire a dev for 6 months to put it into a proper database.
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To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
Surely its not any harder than teaching them basic SQL.
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Surely its not any harder than teaching them basic SQL.
I guess it depends on what you define as "basic SQL". Because most people are already used to working with desktop apps, and familiar with the office programs specifically.
You'd essentially have to teach them programming. Its like when people say "terminal is better than GUI" (it's me, I say that) but then you forget about all of the people who don't know the difference between a desktop and a modem
