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.
@arclight my guy, you just referred to excel as a child’s toy only suitable for tasks less important than girl guide cookie sales and then referred me to your wife as the family excel expert.
Just tell her how little you think of her, don’t involve me in this.
@mhoye I think you're really misunderstanding what I'm saying and that we're probably in furious agreement.
My wife works in emergency management and is regularly called on for complex Excel tasks. She is _literally_ the Excel expert in the household.
It's not that I consider Excel a toy, I consider it a tool used far outside of its intended scope of use by people who are not treated as programmers, not given adequate training or tools for their work. That's a problem.
@arclight "Excel is suitable only for tasks less important than Girl Scout cookie sales tracking."
Even if you're right about nuclear safety calculations - you might be! - a statement like this is on a par with arguing that for safety reasons, the database should be blue.
@mhoye I am biased, insomuch as I was a minor when I was first using Excel at version 1.0.
My dad used to have me write spreadsheets for his business. Unpaid of course (or risk being beaten & not having a roof over my head).
So while I sympathize with the un(der)rpaid part: please don't emasculate me, I contended with enough of that BS.
Excel has *limits*.
1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns
Maximum file size for uploading to a document library: 50 (MB) default. 2 (GB) maximum
@arclight
@mhoye Contrast that with say, a "real" database.
I'll be kind & use SQLite: "The largest possible setting for SQLITE_MAX_PAGE_COUNT is 4294967294. When used with the maximum page size of 65536, this gives a maximum SQLite database size of about 281 terabytes."
So, no Excel is not suitable for "serious" work.
A lot of things are done in Excel.
Yet if you have more rigorous CS issues, please provide code with COMPLETE source.
That disqualifies basically EVERYTHING from M$, period.
@arclight
@arclight Excel isn't even ACID compliant.
You're not the only one calling out how it being misused leads to all kinds of problems either, also see:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/improving-data-integrity-wake-excel-controversy/
CSVs can be useful for lots of things very easy to twiddle with on a command line with sed, awk, tr, cut, grep, etc.
That doesn't mean that they are wise for many other use cases where more stringent methodologies should be considered.
There was, awhile ago now, a report out of Wall Street to the effect that any non-trivial spreadsheet is buggy in some important way, and while they had had every motivation and a lot of money to throw at the problem they just could not fix it.
Code is only as good as your tests, and it's nigh-impossible to test your Excel code.
"ZOMG! SOMEONE CHANGED THE VALUE IN '[concreteparameters.xlsx]#Constants!$CB$34' FROM "0.64" TO "0.32"! WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? BEFORE OR AFTER WE ORDERED THE BRIDGE ABUTMENT MATERIALS?"
"UH, I don't know, it looks like that value is autgenerated from another sheet that was on Phil Miller's laptop (summer intern let go 4 months ago). Actually, it looks like all the constants are reduced by 50%....".
"FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKK! STOP CONSTRUCTION!!!!!!"
True story. Truthy, anyway.
A major problem with #Excel isn't anything to do with sex or age.
It's to do with domain applicability. "Everything is a nail."
The number of times that I've seen people do database work laboriously in Excel when _there's a database tool right there in Microsoft Office_ is depressing. I haven't yet personally seen someone do word processing or mail merge in Excel, but I would not be at all surprised by it.
Too often the problem is that of using only one tool everywhere.
I had a boss in Human Resources who wrote entire Memos and letters in excel. They used the page break preview and never resized the cells, just worked within the page size. It was incredibly frustrating how hard they worked to NOT use the correct tools available to them.
@mhoye i thought it was a dodgy flight simulator…
@mhoye @arclight I agree with your assessment of the marginalization of some of the world's most important programmers, but *part* of that marginalization is that excel is not, in fact, fit for purpose, and they are functionally forced to use it.
Previously: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4
Previously: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
Previously: https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646
Previously: https://www.zdnet.com/article/excel-errors-microsofts-spreadsheet-may-be-hazardous-to-your-health/
@mhoye @arclight @otfrom the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group has a collection of gloriously horrifying stories starring Excel: https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
Their conference is back this year; Chatham House rules and really fun/scary/interesting: https://easychair.org/cfp/EuSpRIG_2023
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.
@mhoye one of the semiconductor test machines I work on uses test programs written entirely in excel. There’s a little gui where you load the parameters and then it spawns five to ten headless excel.exe processes in the background while it tests and bins all the die on a wafer.
I thought for sure the engineer that told me about it was joking but I’ve since had the pleasure of needing to get into the debugging environment and yup, it’s excel macros all the way down 🙃
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