I was compelled to explain in a large training session that Excel and MathCAD are not, Not, NOT acceptable tools for performing QL-1 nuclear safety calculations.
I absolutely hate that I have to keep explaining this to degreed engineers doing safety-critical work.
This just makes me want to cry.
Excel is suitable only for tasks less important than Girl Scout cookie sales tracking. Do not bet anything more valuable than a box of Thin Mints on Excel.
@arclight
Excel is not a spreadsheet. Excel is a full-featured virtual machine running a smalltalk-inspired REPL whose display layer happens to resemble a spreadsheet.
Something like a third of the world’s money goes through Excel every single day, and the reason you don’t think Excel is a Real Programming Language is because if we admitted that, we’d have to admit that most of the most important software in the world was written by underpaid women in pink collar jobs, and we can’t have that.
One of my previous jobs was helping a majority-male civil engineering team fix the problems with introduced by Excel.
What you *can* do with Excel is impressive, there's no question! The project I witnessed included 5,000 lines of BASIC. But you definitely shouldn't!
It's a really bad thing that most of the most important software in the world is written with no type checking and no unit tests.
But it gets worse than that because the typing is often almost completely unpredictable. We've all had issues with Excel aggresively changing things to dates, but a more insideous problem is serial numbers -> scientific notation. That destroys information. There's no way to get it back. You can render a whole Excel "database" useless just with that.
I'm a woman, and I definitely agree that female-coded jobs in STEM deserve more respect, but they also deserve better tooling than Excel. It shouldn't be used for anything important.
I started my career pre-degree doing data mining and reporting in the ops department of UPS. Because we were not in IT or Industrial Engineering, we only had access to MS Access and Excel. I built an application that calculated the container equipment imbalance across the whole country and who needed to send empty containers where to prevent any areas running out. All in excel+access and some VBA macros. It's very powerful, but I would have killed for Java or Python.
Arclight
mhoye
webbureaucrat
wakingrufus