I 100% believe if some scripting language like Python was taught in schools instead of excel we would be in a MUCH better place. I have to deal with user created excel contraptions everyday at my work and they make me want to cry
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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A few years back, someone at corporate made an Excel based "program" for planning our trade shows. It was the most rage inducing rickety ass bullshit contraption I have ever had to deal with. It was basically a data entry wizard GUI for a spreadsheet. But it would crash every 2-3 entries, and lose all the data that had been added since the last save. The only way to save the data involved closing it and restarting it. So I had to close/reopen after every entry just to keep from having to risk redoing it all multiple times.
Two things: VBA and the autosum formula keyboard shortcut.
How's LibreOffice at pivot tables nowadays?
Follow-up question, how's LibreOffice at telling my tech illiterate boss she has to go to IT to get admin rights to install LO so she can open the file I just sent her because I don't morally want to support Microsoft?
MS Office can open LO documents.
Huh. I don't know about the financial system but I'm guessing a good chunk of it is ran by some old mainframes.
It's like the retail industry, still massively relying on IBM i/iSeries/AS400. I worked for a consulting company that was doing a little bit of admin and support work for companies still using this system and the list is still very long. At least it still receives updates, and it's kind of fun/odd to work with if you like CLI, but it's super expensive and absolutely proprietary.
i do all my finances in a physical ledger labeled 'never show to the IRS'
Watch Microsoft ruin another good thing!
Why not use database, actually. I am yet to see anything related to money that is not a rabbit hole of wildly different things interacting by wildly unexpected logic. Ffs, is writing esoteric formulae in a spreadsheet really easier than learning some SQL dialect with a few pretty advanced and specific features?
Queue a 6 month approval process to access data for s'curity
Nice catch, I am annoyed as fuck with access approval even as a dev. But, since I am advocating for moving financial analysis to using databases instead of spreadsheets, it becomes my problem, so: me makes a separate db for this very purpose, and the access is given to any and all accountants. Security guys are welcome to join the dev process of preparing the db and data flows that write from other sources into it, so that financial guys have up-to-date state of data: want restrictions - go ahead and tell them they don't need this and that
counter question: Do you want the people that butcher Excel spreadsheets into abominations to be let loose on your database?
The key advantage of a database ti have everything in one place is also its greatest danger.
You make forms that talk to the dBASE, you don't give them actual dBASE access
No, I will give them a separate one, and when they make a mess out of it, I'll make it known, then fix it without any hurry, then they make another kind of mess, I make it known, fix it with no hurry, then... at some point either they learn (because they make efforts or because get told to by superior management), or I reach the conclusion that working here isn't worth it and move on
sc
You want us to use access? No one wants to use access I'll just make a hyperlink to another book on the last cell
A lot of good answers, but my bet is the third party plug-ins. Does librecalc have SAP Analysis, or the other plug-ins to connect excel to the accounting systems?
SAP is some kind of communicable brain cancer. My company (has factories in over a dozen countries) has been trying to implement it for almost 10 years now. A 5 min job now takes 30min because of all the paperwork that has to go along with it.
SAP stands for Slow Arduous Process.
Just gonna drop this here: http://visidata.org/
Blows excel out of the water, at least for tabular data (which, frankly, is what all financial data should be... Cell-based formulas are a mistake).
three reasons:
- power query
- keyboard shortcuts
- pioneer for new functions (e.g., xlookup, dot-colon, let, etc)
oh, and excel doesn't crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
Libre office is significantly more stable for me than office365 on a win11 machine running on hardware from 2023. It just always works and quickly.
oh, and excel doesn’t crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
then you aren't running anything past Excel 2016
Of course not, we're talking about Enterprise here. Newer versions of Excel won't run on Windows XP.
My only complaint is the blinding white cells. There's a reason why like every other major program uses dark mode.
Excel doesn't have dark mode? That's literally incredible.
but then how do you print?
Ctrl+P
no i mean if it's white it looks like what is printed. if dark how do you know what it will look like?
Preview the printing?
Not by default, and if you use it all the formatting (cell colors, borders, etc) doesn't work well anymore. Done up sheets with good formatting are unreadable, unless you're already very familiar with them.
I used to change the blinding white to a light grey, but it doesn't jive with the border colors and on large sheets it adds to the file size quite substantially.
on large sheets it adds to the file size quite substantially
Well, it's an awful lot of extra grey pixels to store...
Formatting data is extra data. Try it yourself on a large sheet.
I don't have access (heh) to Excel though. But I take your word for it. :)
Hahaha Haha Hahaha Haha Hahaha Haha... /Sigh
Ffs.
As someone who works in a Fortune 100 company, the number of spreadsheets we have for the vast majority of our tasks...
The biggest issue I've seen is how do you get a bunch of data to look and behave between a bunch of users who have different skillsets and varying knowledge about how the data connects to other data?
You could build a web page with a database backend. But this takes hours when plopping the data into a spreadsheet is minutes.
Accountants are learning python to parse spreadsheets now
I work in the accounting department of an insurance company doing python development, killing excel spreadsheet processes one by one. I hate when the sources came in excel because polars lazyframes dosen't work as nice that with other formats like csv or parquet. My outputs are always parquets is they are going to be used by other processes or excel if they for humans.
Meanwhile Banks are using... Bank Python.
Interesting reading. I'm an actuarie in an insurance company and everything I do is in python, is easy to maintain because I'm a "solo developer" building custom tools for me and my team (with pyinstall to create GUIs of the programs so they can used them), but my internal libraries have started to grow up.
About the comments the author had about pandas, I just started to move away from it to polars because the databases I'm working now have easy 50M+ rows, and as they say came for the speed stay for the syntax. I'm debating myself if make my intern learn pandas first, or just go for polars from the begging.
Thanks for sharing - that's actually pretty interesting. I knew about Polars, but I didn't know it performed better. I know about that in passing from folks that are in the Cloud "Data" space, who use SaaS platforms that are heavily Python based. That includes Pandas and Polars, but also Jupyter. That really threw me for a loop, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
In the first project that I had to use polars because the databases couldn't be processed, I moved from spending 40min just uploading to memory one of the bases on pandas to 10min doing all the process on polars.
That convinced me to move everything forward to polars.
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