Excel Never Dies

Excel is a software that is, to this day, probably the most used BI Tool still to this day.

Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of  Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form. From Excel Never Dies, Packy McCormick.

From my article on A Diary of a Data Engineer | ssp.sh:

I was in a coffee meeting with a finance analyst—call her Maria. Fifteen years at the company. She opened her laptop and showed me an Excel file (sometimes it was Microsoft Access DB with a custom UI!).

Forty-seven tabs. Formulas referencing other files on a shared drive. VBA macros from 2012. VLOOKUP nested inside SUMIF.

“This is how we calculate the quarterly forecast”.

From my perspective of making it available to everyone and needing to understand it, I was a little shocked. I’d spent three weeks reverse-engineering the business logic, trying to understand it, trying to recreate it in SQL Server, and adding it to our data warehouse. But the numbers were never the same, close most of the time.

After having multiple such experiences, sometimes Microsoft Access databases with custom UI built in (!!!), I learned something. Though my initial reaction was shock and horror, I learned that Excel isn’t the enemy. Excel is the business telling you what they actually need.

When someone asks to export to Excel, they’re not rejecting your work. They’re telling you something. Maybe your dashboard is too slow. Maybe they need to add a column you didn’t think of. Maybe they just need to feel in control of their analysis.

Power users will overengineer everything, but ask them for the Excel file and you might get validated business logic and ETL code for free. Win-win.

But, Can I Export it to Excel? – Do Mo(o)re with Data

Meet Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 77-Year-Old Artist Who ‘Paints’ Japanese Landscapes With Excel — Colossal

Video: The Michelangelo of Microsoft Excel - YouTube
Origin: The Most Dangerous App We ALL Use - YouTube by Enrico Tartarotti

• Is Excel immortal? by Benn Stancil
• Pivot Table and Why Pivot Tables Never Die
• BI is Dead

Origin: Excel Never Dies - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
References: BI never Dies