All large companies run on Excel

[JS80]

I am amazed that oracle has $100+ billion in revenue for the piece of shit it is.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Have any of you dealt with the nightmare jumble of proprietary DB's and reporting programs used by Universities, Health care or, Food Services? Excel would be a step up.

 

[I Saw OJ]

Originally posted by: iamwiz82

Originally posted by: OdiN

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: iamwiz82
Access = IT hell

Fixed.

If you want major data problems, set a bunch of undertrained people to use MS Access or something equivalent. Stuff will be indexed wrong, the fields will be the wrong type, the queries won't make any sense, and you'll spend a great deal of time trying to figure out what stuff means.

Excel is redundant, but it's very straight-forward. You have to be a retard to screw it up.

Wrong. I use Acces and Excel extensively here at work.

With Access....why would you EVER allow a user any sort of access to fields or queries, etc. They should see forms only, period. You shouldn't have to figure out what stuff means because you should be the one who puts it there. I develop Access-based applications used in many business processes here. There really isn't any need for anything else.

Excel is great and has some amazing functionality.

SAP is horrid. I HATE SAP!

The problem with Access is some script monkey writes a little DB to keep track of the widgets in his department. He then tells everyone in the dept. about it, and they get all excited. 12 months later the person is gone, but the DB is growing into some mutant from hell, poorly coded and with no real structure, all of a sudden, it blows up and the department head comes to IT, demanding it be fixed. Sorry, unsupported DB, contact the programmer.

Bingo, had to deal with problems like that more than I want to count.

Although I do like Excel, faily simple yet pretty powerful.

 

[Fritzo]

Yeah, we're all Access and SQL. We use Excel in like 3 forms.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Originally posted by: LegendKiller

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
Correct. I have been implementing and supporting Oracle systems for over ten years. Oracle absolutely sucks for reporting and data exporting.

It's a lot less expensive and time consuming a lot of times to just perform a data dump from the database and manipulate it using Excel than it is to have a developer build a custom report or interface.

Where crap in a can reports failed me was taking data and being able to slice charts by specific groupings of finance contracts. Static pool analysis.

Essentially you group contracts of similar types, say by FICO score buckets (450-500 FICO score, 500-550) when they were originated in a certain year (2007). Then matching those buckets and contracts to contracts that defaulted. I needed to know when they defaulted and be able to come up with the %. This also needed to be manipulated so that I can look at the base %'s, not just a pretty chart.

The warehouse and query tool were great for bulk processing, such as determining which contracts fit into the buckets, or when/how the contracts defaulted. However, it utterly failed when trying to combine the numerator (defaulted contract bucket) with the denominator (origination volume bucket).

When it came down to it, they just couldn't match up originations separated out by so many buckets. I had to have this data by FICO, original term length, origination year...etc.

Complex analysis and usage of data for modeling is impossible in ERP systems. When it comes down to it, that type of stuff is just too customized and complicated.

Sounds like you need an application like Hyperion or OutlookSoft that can capture and parse the data into dimensions/cubes. Oracle and SAP are great systems for capturing data but have putrid out of the box reporting solutions. That's where the need for a third-party reporting/analysis tool is needed.

 

[Genx87]

I'd imagine somebody could write middleware to pull the data from excel into the erp system.

 

[Genx87]

btw Ill admit, I can do the very basic stuff in excel hehe
But my last employer which was an investment bank used some crazy ass excel sheets for the financials of the companies they were working for. People come ask me a question and I'd pass them onto one of the analysts hehe.

 

[Zee]

Originally posted by: AmpedSilence

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: Train

Originally posted by: Ns1
We have a client that can't export ANYTHING out of their accounting/"ERP" software into excel. I hate them.

Are you kidding, ANYTHING can be imported into excel. Tell them to give you a .txt and set up excel to parse it.

They can't export to .csv. They can't export to .xls. They still use goddamn dot matrix printers.

Last time they sent us a file I had to setup crystal reports to get useful data out of it.

Their firewall is so locked down, they can't send OR receive pdf's and excel files.

I hate them to the max. This is a 30 million dollar company that wants to grow to a 50m company.

I suppose all they can give you are fixed field layout files?

Better: they give me huge reams of 500+ papers in dot matrix binders. they still have that shit ribbon on the side and are still connected to each other. I once had to "split" 300 documents so I could feed them into the ADF in the copier and make copies.

This was like, 6 months ago, not 15 fucking years ago.

**head assplodes**

This is one of those situations where the CIO should be fired or the IT department should be revamped due to being counter productive. The IT should be supportive of Business Operations... not the other way around.

 

[IronWing]

Excel is awesome unless you want to manipulate dates/times. Then you will know it means to become frothy mouthed lunatic. Fortunately one can save as .csv, manipulate dates with perl, and re-import to Excel.

 

[sdifox]

Small companies do too...

 

[Pollock]

What does Apple use?

 

[IronWing]

Originally posted by: Pollock
What does Apple use?

VisiCalc

 

[zanejohnson]

Originally posted by: iamwiz82
Excel plus Access = IT hell

throw something that requires sql server too and your right on track.

 

[Descartes]

You speak the truth. As others have already added, Access definitely belongs in that category.

It really is impressive how inefficiently some companies are run, be it with Excel, Access, etc. I've spent most of my career simultaneously thankful and frustrated by it.

 

[tfinch2]

I like to make spreadsheets about how awesome I am.

 

[PowerEngineer]

As others have said, Excel is a great piece of software.

Perhaps the best non-technical reason to love it is that it gives power users a tool that the IT dictatorships can't control. If you give me an Excel interface, I can do my own thing -- no need to bow and scrape to the almighty IT programmers and buearocracy.

The (related) weakness is that it's hard to manage/document changes to spreadsheets. Mistakes can be costly.

 

[NovaProspekt]

PeopleSoft is awful. You aren't missing anything.

 

[cw42]

I don't understand how people can handle 15,000pg excel docs with 140 worksheets...

 

[mb]

Originally posted by: cw42
I don't understand how people can handle 15,000pg excel docs with 140 worksheets...

Try doing it on a 17" (16" viewable) CRT :|

 

[Howard]

If I couldn't generate a PO in less than 2 minutes I'd be toast.

 

[Joemonkey]

oh yeah? try dealing with a huge AS/400 database for your ERP and Domino/Notes for your email and most database applications, then everyone wanting everything that comes out of both to be exported to Excel

 

[fire400]

Get a reality check.

Fortune 500/1K companies must know how to use Microsoft Excel software, does that mean "everything" runs on it? No.

Are you going to use soley Microsoft Excel on a 64-processor MONARCH computer? Get your facts straight.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: fire400
Get a reality check.

Fortune 500/1K companies must know how to use Microsoft Excel software, does that mean "everything" runs on it? No.

Are you going to use soley Microsoft Excel on a 64-processor MONARCH computer? Get your facts straight.

Uh, I beg to differ. Most crucial operational functions do indeed run on excel. 10s of millions of dollars of software can disappear, as long as they have their critical spreadsheets.

The mainframe can die, the entire ERP can die and operations will continue as long as they have their spreadsheets.

Ever do disaster recovery? Meeting with every business group their number 1 priority is "can I get to my spreadsheets, that's what I need."

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Descartes
You speak the truth. As others have already added, Access definitely belongs in that category.

It really is impressive how inefficiently some companies are run, be it with Excel, Access, etc. I've spent most of my career simultaneously thankful and frustrated by it.

Yeah, I guess it's because we've been exposed to so much of it from so many companies that it becomes stunningly clear.

 

[PricklyPete]

LOL...I had an even worse situation at my old company when we were installing our ERP solution. They would fill out a purchase order "request" form in Excel...print it out... and then fax it from one room to another where a secretary would than place the fax in the purchasing managers bin. The next day the purchasing manager would then write all over the purchasing request form and place it back into another bin where the secretary would then fax the rejected or accepted form back to the original purchaser. They would then update the purchase request form on their machine as needed and save them in a "shared" folder on a person's machine that was not even being backed up. The secretary of the purchasing manager would then file the "marked up request" form in a filing cabinet. Finally the original purchaser would enter the order into the legacy system and the purchasing managers secretary would then approve it.

We proceeded to install the new ERP system. Regardless of what I recommended to several levels of management...I believe they are still doing their asinine manual process. When I suggested it to the actual workers themselves...they got all pissed off...not because it didn't make sense...but they all realized half their jobs were not needed.

Obviously I've witnessed many ridiculous processes since that time...but that one still takes the cake for me.