Excel's place in the modern business world

[bill]

Hello,
I work in the big fancy worl of corporate IT and work with fancy pancy technologies like SAP as their version of datwarehouse, BW.

If for example the business wants to cultivate a breed of users who can go into the business warehouse and slice-and-dice data, dependency on Excel (and those who provide solutions) is more hurtful than helpful.

Then there's the Security and Controls issue where, once an XLS reaches a users desktop, all bets are off regards assuring no one overwrites per-populated numbers (sure, you can add password protection but, cracks are everywhere).

It even becomes more an issue if you use Excel to write to a database...

Anyway, I'd like to get an overall feel regards where you see Excel in your biz...

Thanks!

 

[Cbrine]

Bill,
Here's my take on the utilization of Excel.

No matter how many facey smamcy data stores you use, the user is going to want to be able to manipulate that data and make it more presentable to his/her audience. I've worked with everything from MSI(Terradata's DSS) to access and I found they are very limited on what they can do for presentation. Another factor is that your data is not all stored in the same place, sometimes you want to merge outside vendor data, summerize data in a way the DSS can't, merge data from a legacy system, and numerous other uses. While excel doesn't excel(Couldn't help it) at ODBC data extraction, it can process that data with far more agility that those other tools, mostly because it was made to from it's inception.
As far as what my office uses it for.
1. EDI Vendor consolidation
2. Merit Processes
3. Bonus calculations.
4. Creating distribution workbooks to the field.

These are just the some of the processes that I have automated with Excel, we have hundreds of other users with hundreds of other workbooks as well. I think we will lose the spreadsheet around the time offices become paperless.

HTH
Cal

 

[doco]

I think we will lose the spreadsheet around the time offices become paperless.

Ya, like thats going to happen.

 

[gwkenny]

Actually, I know of a home health care provider on Long Island that's about as paperless as you can be. Mail gets received, scanned in and then everything is done electronically. This was 10 years ago!

I was floored. With all the forms in the medical field and how much the government is involved with medicare and medicaid, it was extremely impressive!

In the world of high finance Excel isn't going to go anywhere. The big banks have built up their personal databases on Company info and quite a few now have tools to help analyze the information but there is no way a custom app can be created to perform all the analysis you can perform in Excel as quickly and customizable on the fly. Thus all the banks have integrated data links so info can be dumped into Excel/Word for analysis and presentation purposes.

There's a ton of money being made by people doing this type of automation for financial houses. Not talking 100's or 1000's, but tens of millions of dollars.

funky funky

 

[lenze]

The real issue came to a head in 1996, when the GAO (federal bean counters) found out a lot of money could be saved by using email to transfer documents from one department or agencey to another. They so decreed. Unfortunately, there was a problem. Some agencies used Excel, some used Lotus, and others still used minor SS programs. Likewise with Word, WordPerfect and others. At that time, these programs did not work well with each other so the GAO formed a commitee to decide on a federal standard office platform. In early 1997, they choose the new kid on the block, Office 97 and decreed that all federal agencies convert by mid 1998. The majority of state governments, since they trade documents with the feds, followed suit. It was only a matter of time before the private sector joined on. The last major hold out of any size were the lawyers. They didn't want to part with WordPerfect.

It is interesting that this decree came the SAME year the DOJ started the anti-trust investigations against MS, after the GAO had just given MS a monopoly. Anyway, MS Office will be around until GAO has another hicky.

lenze

BTW: Excel is NOT a spreadsheet program. It is a Data Analysis Program that uses a spreadsheet as its interface.

 

[Joe C]

Bill
I work in an SAP enviroment.
And let me tell you if it wasn't for my ability to use excel most of the data I am working with would be useless.

Now maybe that is because we have poor BW reports but this is my second Sap-BW company and both have relied on heavy excel manipulation of the BW reports in excel.