What do people in your day job use a spreadsheet for?
This post is an activity I've found useful in idea generation. It's pretty simple, just write down something that you've seen someone do in a spreadsheet. Non-technical people especially.
If you don't have a day job you can still do this. Think back to when you did have a job or ask your wife or a friend the same question.
For example, my boss keeps a spreadsheet of all the clients, what products they have licences for and their renewal dates. Each week they cross reference this with accounts paid and every so often ask the programmers to run some SQL to generate a new spreadsheet.
They've been doing this for 15 years and I guess it works for them. Seems kinda clunky and insane to a programmer but it makes you wonder how many other businesses are solving the same problems in house.
What are your spreadsheet stories?
Lists, lists, and more lists. But NOT list management or collaboration around the lists.
Airtable.com has become a Unicorn for a lot of reasons and "this" is one.
I started using Visicalc in 1979 on an Apple II, and it changed my life in some powerful ways. Lotus 123 on the IBM PC changed my income bracket. Filemaker, however, changed everything for me. But not for enough people apparently.
Airtable looks amazing! You started using Visicalc the year before I was born lol. I thought I was an old hat, but I guess we're never too old to create amazing products. Congrats!
I've seen many people, mainly Product Managers and Customer Support heads/leads using a spreadsheet to keep the important feedback. Then they use it to categorize feedback to bug reports, feature requests and prioritize dev work. That's why we started Feedgrip. In order to improve these people lives :D
Number of feedback items can be huge, things may get lost and prioritization over these gets done badly. So, we're hoping to fix this :)
Great post btw
I practically live in excel.. The flexibility it offers is trully remarkable. But, this freedom comes with its heavy price. I have seen thousands of dollars being lost because of wrong formulas, incomplete assumptions and wild hardcoded values. This is why I began building solverace.com to standarize the calculations world and offer peace of mind across all industries :)
I feel like spreadsheets are used for EVERYTHING in every job, no matter what your day job is about. In my company, spreadsheets are used for:
▶️ HR - Especially keeping track of vacation or the whole team.
▶️ Checking if we comply with standards - we to technical work and need to check if our designs comply with different standards.
▶️ Design calculations - our calculation spreadsheets are not super complex though.
▶️ Sharing data with clients/comment logs - which I sometimes find awful btw. They write full paragraphs in cells, which is the opposite of what spreadsheets are designed for haha
I truly believe being proficient at Excel is such a polivalent skill to have but feel that most people tend to underestimate the power of them.
I've suggested my company - several times - to offer a ''0 to Mastery'' Excel course to all of the employees, I think that'd improve our productivity a lot.
I personally rarely use spreadsheets but I guess that's because as a programmer there's often a more appealing way to solve the problem. That said, programmers do fall into the trap of over-engineering the solution a lot when a spreadsheet can solve it much more easily. I'd like to think I have a healthy balance these days when Excel is the right solution.
I used to think spreadsheet use was a clear sign of "problem to be solved", but lately I've revised that opinion. Spreadsheets are an incredibly versatile, powerful tool and they often solve a problem better than a bespoke solution would. They're free, easy to use, easy to share, and the people using them can modify them without relying on others. I even go out of my way to export my financial data from a normal app to a spreadsheet!
All great points! That versatility comes at a price though. It's easy to override data or lose sight of what's happening with hidden complexity. But I'm a huge fan!
Since you mentioned financial data, have you heard of Tiller? It exports your financial transaction data into Google Sheets automatically.
Yup, that's what I use! :)
👍
Yes absolutely! It's always worth asking if there really is a problem to be solved. Any alternative solution should be put through the grinder before being implemented.
To do lists, project plans, financial business cases/analysis, P&Ls, issue trackers, budgets
Accounting and Finance professionals, in my experience, are power user of spreadsheets. I've used spreadsheets for lists, to-dos, etc. when I want something to be more easily scannable and maintainable compared to a word doc. Such as - business requirements, functional requirements, RACIS, bug reporting, interview notes, etc. I'll also use spreadsheets to do some numbers crunching when SQL isn't an option; data visualization; data importing. Lot's of utilities for spreadsheets. It all crumbles when spell check, collaboration, etc. are required as those are typical painful to manage / compensate for.
From a business perspective - Yes, sure it sounds insane sometimes, especially when it can be easily automated and could have a definite time save by not having to crunch numbers. But, the reliance on someone to run it, automate it, implement it, implement change requests, maintain it, etc. may be the higher cost. Being a BA/PM for the majority of my career, stuck between the tech and business worlds, there is definitely some interesting and common themes in terms of perceived needs, assumptions, practically, etc. that one groups places upon the other.
To be honest it does sound a little insane to me coming from a company that puts a high value on automation.
It reminds me of a story one of my friends told me a while back. He found himself in a job that involved nearly 6 hours of spreadsheet work each day. He wasn't a great programmer but his bother taught him a few things and little by little he started to automate his work. Eventually he got his 6 hours a day down to just 1 hour of work to achieve the same outcome. Ironically, he ended up quitting that job because he got bored after he ran out of things to automate.
I have also worked in companies that have a high cost turnaround for automating things so I feel your pain. It's unfortunate that getting things automated is often a higher cost than the alternative.
Bug tracking with a colour coded system of severity/priority and a link to the Jira URL.
But why not prioritize within Jira you ask? The company I was working for had a weird set up of statuses and tags that seemed to suit the management, but nobody else.
I've gone down this route as well. I used to use excel/google sheets to track my investments in one place but found it clunky so started www.holfolio.com to improve the process and make it easier to share with others
One of the worst I've ever seen was suppliers providing price lists with images as Excel documents. The images are in a separate layer in Excel and don't actually occupy a cell like data, so the rows were resized manually and the image for each product was placed over an empty cell at the beginning of each row. These lists contained hundreds of products, the biggest I've ever worked with being 530+ products.
To get the images out of the spreadsheet, one office employee would spend days copying them out one at a time by right-clicking on each image and saving it to a folder, then uploading it to the correct product in the CMS by clicking through the "Edit Product" dialogs.
The suppliers, as you have already probably guessed, refused to to take any advice about storage formats and every single supplier did this. They even do this with PDFs where information that could easily go in a plain text file is saved as a PDF through Word making it very cumbersome to recover and excluding automated solutions.
Oh my, that sounds horrible.
Reminds me of when I worked for a snail mail marketing company and one of the big clients would send through large spreadsheets of "rules" to generate different letters for different market segments. Essentially the idea is to send a letter to every customer that's personalized with an "offer" for them to sign up.
The problem was, they wouldn't keep the format consistent because they would add in extra cells, change the meaning of cells or simply move things around for no apparent reason. The end result was me having to write a sophisticated parser that in most cases handled the crazy marketing department ;)
I am guilty of using Excel on a daily basis, I use it to make forecast models. Up until now, I didn't find a better product which is flexible, structured and transparent.
What products did you try and why were they not sufficient for you?
The problem is not only my side of the business, but also on the other side. Advisors that use my models (on the sell and buy-side) want to understand what happens in de model. Excel is installed on almost all (Windows) computers and they have a bit of familiarity with it as well. That is why I am looking for solutions where I can transfer Excel models to web apps: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/from-excel-model-to-webapp-edcdd87aee. That way when someone validates my model, it can run as a "trusted" Web App
Sounds interesting. Do you have any idea why your clients would prefer a web app based solution? Excel is like a really powerful swiss army knife, but generalization can be a disadvantage in some situations. The next thing I can think of that it's really easy to create a formula mess which is hard to understand and to maintain properly. So: What are the most urgent pain points your clients have?
Those are some interesting questions!
As a bonus, our models are made in the FAST-standard. Very interesting stuff if you are scared of long unreadable formulas.
Pretty interesting. Looks to me like conflicting interests at first glance: Your clients seem to love fiddling around with the internals of your sheets. Having a clean web app interface could hide a lot of the dirty details and complexity your clients might be interested in.
Maybe a web based app with a switch between high and low level abstraction could be a solution. To create a meaningful level of abstraction you probably need a lot of domain specific knowledge, which you seem to have, which is good.
How important is the label "FAST-standard" to your clients? Is it possible to get this label for a web app?
Again, interesting questions/remarks!
If you are going for a web app with a server backend, you might even be able to get a speed up by throwing hardware on it, i.e. by parallelizing calculations. Not sure to what degree this is possible with your models. Sometimes things just can not be parallelized. What value do you think your clients would attribute to a speedup of 2x, 10x, 100x?
Well, in my domain (software industry) abstractions are powerful tools, if you know exactly what you are doing. I often see wrong abstractions that only create cruft and cognitive overhead. I can only emphasize that domain knowledge is super important here.
So you probably have to find out which parts of your sheets you can hide and which not, and I think it is likely that only your clients can answer that.
Okay, FAST seems to be important for sharing, so I was wondering if this is really necessary. Why do clients even share your models with advisors? Is this intended by your current business model or rather something you would like to prevent because of your IP?
I'm excited to see you launching :-)
I keep saying it: great questions remarks:
What value do you think your clients would attribute to a speedup of 2x, 10x, 100x?
So you probably have to find out which parts of your sheets you can hide and which not, and I think it is likely that only your clients can answer that.
Why do clients even share your models with advisors? Is this intended by your current business model or rather something you would like to prevent because of your IP?
Since it is not my field of expertise and you come across as very knowledgable, do you mind me sending you an email?
Of course, just drop me a mail: rynvelt at gmail dot com
I'm always interested in learning new things.
I work for a web development agency and we have to use Google Sheets for project management/time tracking!! Couldn't believe it when the boss showed me this to go through their colour code system for project to do item statuses :D
He started the company in the 90s so maybe it was the way to track things back then, but I hope for something more professional given it's supposed to be a tech co.
Yep. I have a friend with a similar story. He works on software built in Borland C++ 5 with over a million lines of code. It's insane.
I like using spread sheets for anything number related which I want to keep track of.
It helps to just pick just one thing at a time and be more specific. What's an example of something you keep track of?