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All large companies run on Excel

S

spidey07

No Lifer
It still blows my mind that even the largest of companies with 10s of millions of dollars in hardware, software, custom development, web enable, workforce automated, etc still run on excel.

The business would literally collapse if they can't get all that yummy data from the big expensive "system" and put it into excel. Even if it means hours of copying/pasting data, gotta put it in excel. Give them query tools and customized front ends, gotta be portable to excel.

Case in point - purchase order. In order to do so an excel form must be filled out in excruciating detail, takes probably an hour if not more just to fill out the correct fields. This form is then manually entered, by hand by somebody in purchasing to the ERP purchasing application.

When asked why this process is so redundant the answer is - "so we can track the purchase in our excel budget spreadsheet"

GAHHH!!!
 
Hahaha!

I'm developing an app that's hosted within SharePoint right now, and it's got some DevExpress grids that are pretty sweet (out-of-the-box grouping, sorting, filtering, blah blah blah).

One of their requests: Can we export the grid data to Excel? Nevermind there will be reports produced on the data that, yes, can be natively exported to Excel. lol.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
It still blows my mind that even the largest of companies with 10s of millions of dollars in hardware, software, custom development, web enable, workforce automated, etc still run on excel.

The business would literally collapse if they can't get all that yummy data from the big expensive "system" and put it into excel. Even if it means hours of copying/pasting data, gotta put it in excel. Give them query tools and customized front ends, gotta be portable to excel.

Case in point - purchase order. In order to do so an excel form must be filled out in excruciating detail, takes probably an hour if not more just to fill out the correct fields. This form is then manually entered, by hand by somebody in purchasing to the ERP purchasing application.

When asked why this process is so redundant the answer is - "so we can track the purchase in our excel budget spreadsheet"

GAHHH!!!
Click to expand...

I work in Accounting. I have Excel open from the moment I arrive until the moment I leave for the day and usually have 5-6 spreadsheets open at any given time.

BTW-We use Oracle here.
 
Dude, the military runs on Excel and Power point, and throw in Outlook only as a method to move all these .xls and .ppt files around.
 
Not all large companies. Some are very tech savy. However, you'll find that a huge number of reporting tools are not end-user friendly so a lot of folks especially in finance, still want the ability to manipulate data in excel.
 
We only use Excel for internal record keeping. System wide we have 2 systems for expense reports and purchasing. One of them is Peoplesoft by Oracle.

Ps. We're a very large company.
 
Originally posted by: iamwiz82
Access = IT hell
Click to expand...

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.
 
We have a client that can't export ANYTHING out of their accounting/"ERP" software into excel. I hate them.
 
My old company used to have wiz-bang Oracle systems with a Brio data query tool. The thing could produce pretty little canned reports with charts and shit. Yet, it couldn't slice and dice data worth dick. Formulas inside the query tool blew goats, as did any type of table reporting. The thing had errors in how it calculated fields, especially complex imbedded formulas.

All of my work was exported to excel and manipulated there because the system sucked so much ass. They spent millions on it and it was effectively worthless. At that place they told us we couldn't export any of the datawarehouse data to excel. That lasted about 24 hours.

When it comes down to it, Excel does what it does fricking well. It is flexible and far more user friendly to those who actually need to work with data rather than relying on canned shit. It may be slower and might not be as pretty, but once you get it customized with everything I can produce 5x better data, models, and charts than any canned oracle shit.



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

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

 
Originally posted by: LegendKiller
My old company used to have wiz-bang Oracle systems with a Brio data query tool. The thing could produce pretty little canned reports with charts and shit. Yet, it couldn't slice and dice data worth dick. Formulas inside the query tool blew goats, as did any type of table reporting. The thing had errors in how it calculated fields, especially complex imbedded formulas.

All of my work was exported to excel and manipulated there because the system sucked so much ass. They spent millions on it and it was effectively worthless. At that place they told us we couldn't export any of the datawarehouse data to excel. That lasted about 24 hours.

When it comes down to it, Excel does what it does fricking well. It is flexible and far more user friendly to those who actually need to work with data rather than relying on canned shit. It may be slower and might not be as pretty, but once you get it customized with everything I can produce 5x better data, models, and charts than any canned oracle shit.
Click to expand...

Every ERP system is totally and completely customizable to do anything and everything needed. There just isn't any need to export it into excel.

Now keep those SAP programmers and consultants well employed!
 
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.
Click to expand...

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

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.
 
Excel is unversally used and a great tool. You don't generate reports in Excel, you just output the data from MS Reporting Services, Crystal, custom queries, etc... to Excel.
 
Why pay millions of dollars for slow, bulky, difficult programs when Excel will do the same thing in a user-friendly way for a couple hundred dollars? If you can think of it, business-wise, Excel can probably do it quickly if you have half a brain.

Not that Excel is perfect. It has some shortcomings, ones that really don't affect the buisness world. And there are other spreadsheets with similar capabilities. But, most people can open and use Excel files.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
Every ERP system is totally and completely customizable to do anything and everything needed. There just isn't any need to export it into excel.

Now keep those SAP programmers and consultants well employed!
Click to expand...

What an utterly ridiculous statement.

There's a lot of stuff I know that can't be done through ERP. That's what keeps me employed.

I had several Oracle guys completely stymied by my requests. This was when I worked for a $20bn sales company where they spent 10s of millions getting a datawarehouse together. Half of that was spent getting it in shape for consumer finance and specifically my department.

Don't believe in your false god of canned reports. It may work for 80% of your stuff that takes 20% of a company's time. However, that remaining 20% is done by people who have particular needs that take 80% of the time.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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

We have reports out of Oracle that are a nightmare to bring into Excel because it puts half of a set of data on one line and the other half of the data on the line below it so it isn't linked to anything. To top that off, page breaks might split it up even more.
 
Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: spidey07
Every ERP system is totally and completely customizable to do anything and everything needed. There just isn't any need to export it into excel.

Now keep those SAP programmers and consultants well employed!
Click to expand...

What an utterly ridiculous statement.

There's a lot of stuff I know that can't be done through ERP. That's what keeps me employed.

I had several Oracle guys completely stymied by my requests. This was when I worked for a $20bn sales company where they spent 10s of millions getting a datawarehouse together. Half of that was spent getting it in shape for consumer finance and specifically my department.

Don't believe in your false god of canned reports. It may work for 80% of your stuff that takes 20% of a company's time. However, that remaining 20% is done by people who have particular needs that take 80% of the time.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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