Spreadsheets

>Excel is something you bust out for a one-off problem or something not important enough to deal with spending the time designing a proper solution in a proper language
That's what everyone says in the beginning. I'm a software engineer at a Fortune 50 company. We have an entire team of developers whose job is to convert people's shit Excel macros and Access databases into proper solutions.

Basically what happens is this:
>guy with literally zero technical know-how needs a spreadsheet for something, so he uses Excel
>he needs to crunch some of those numbers, so he Googles enough for some copy/paste macros
>he shows it to his coworker who starts using it, too
>7 people are now using it and it's impossible to make changes anymore since they're all accessing it from a shared network folder
>guy does more googling and converts it to an Access database that's a mountain of garbage but functional
>12 weeks later the entire department is using it, but now they need something they can't do in Access
>gets shipped over to the developers who write a web application to do what they need

>I've never done anything with Reliability & Maintainability or Safety Analysis in my life.
If you're upgrading from excel, you go to a database. If you think otherwise, you shouldn't have ever been using excel for whatever you're using it for in the first place.

You have no idea of the bazillion accounting spreadsheets for all the small and medium sized business in existance and all the fuckery that went into them. Nobody understands. The horrors..

Yep, I'm not saying Excel isn't still abused by any means, but people who disregard it entirely and tell you to design a fucking database, do everything with Python/R or both are morons. It has its place.
I work with plenty of abhorrent Excel, Access and SharePoint solutions being used far beyond their means on a daily basis, sometimes life just sucks. It's not worth the wasted developer time to build a pretty website to make an obscure process slightly more convenient when there's much more critical work to do.

>It has its place.
Yeah, this is certainly true. Still, I don't touch any of it. I hate it.
>he hates it
yeah, I really do

I rarely touch anything I didn't write unless it's a very basic sheet with minimal or no formulas, it's perfectly valid to hate dealing with that shit. Nobody's got time for that.

But I mean, I didn't really need to have IT provision an SQL/web host or set up a development environment for me just to have a pretty looking checklist or a simple form for a two-day side project with some basic statistics. It's one thing if you're passing around a bunch of 240 MB spreadsheets glued together with shitloads of incomprehensible formulas and VBA for all of your record keeping, but if you just want to crunch some numbers on a small data set or temporarily keep track of some basic information in a collaboration-friendly manner, spreadsheets aren't really bad at all. It's just that sometimes they grow into an abortion far beyond what anyone had ever intended.

>you go to a database
And what do you use to interface that database? A programming language!

>Whatever god awful garbage fire of a non-normalized database or half-assed python solution you'll shit out in 15 minutes isn't going to be much better, in fact it would probably do more harm than good.
Absolutely pulled out of your ass. Writing a clean python script to do some data manipulation is not hard especially with numpy.

Where are you getting the data from, and how to you keep it and maintain it? How are you going to present it and collaborate with others? It's certainly a superior solution to Excel in many ways, but Excel and applications like it still provide an imperfect but nonetheless extremely convenient, self-contained and effective way of answering those questions.

What then of PowerPivot? It's like an SQL engine built into Excel. Someone put in the effort to get all the data table out of a SQL db and into Excel so people (aka managers) without access to or knowledge of SQL can use it. Should you just toss that out or what?

I don't know if I fully understand the question. It's maybe a little more overhead than I'd personally care for, but I don't think it's really inconsistent with my opinions. As you already noted, Excel can serve as much as a convenient front-end for a simple database as it can be a back-end, being able to wrap up a more complex database in the same convenient package sounds great, as long as you're choosing the right solution for the right problem.

>Where are you getting the data from, and how to you keep it and maintain it?
CSV files, databases, cpickle, even excel files can be read and written to via python.

>How are you going to present it
Matplotlib and LaTeX. Matplotlib can convert figures directly to pgf files so the look really nice in LaTeX and LaTeX has slideshow classes. Plus it’s easy to write out a .tex file with data formatted as a table I have a super simple script that uses numpy write out method (don’t remeber what it’s called) and save it directly to my presentations tables directory. Another script saves .pgf figures directly to the figures dir.

>and collaborate with others?
Either with python, or csvs, or excel files since I can save to those if I wanted to. But luckily the people I work with generally pass around csvs.

It's great if that works for you and your team, but that sounds like a lot of wasted time for most other people and jobs where Excel would get busted out for. Even if you ignore the need to learn how to effectively use all of the tools to the point that you can do a better job than Excel, that's a lot of extra files, steps and boilerplate bullshit to go through for small projects that frankly just aren't that important, not to mention the headache of relying on tools that likely wouldn't be included in a standard image on everyone's system, or the endless potential for missteps and fuckups I can see just thinking of passing CSVs around on a collaborative effort.

I'd use your methods for a bigger project I'd expect to stick around for a while and be used by a lot of people, but for something I'm just doing on the side where I just need to see a list of shit in a big table that I can search and filter and sort through and generate quick charts/statistics or print labels off of, that's a lot of extra work that just isn't worth it for such little net benefit.

Hahaha you think this is true?

I work at an engineering firm

a fuckton of engineers unironically use excel for calculations, like 30 odd worksheets to a file. They then wonder why it's slow.

Think what is true? Read the thread before you shitpost.

>but that sounds like a lot of wasted time for most other people and jobs where Excel would get busted out for.
Where’s the wasted time? Python is faster to write than messing with excel.

>Even if you ignore the need to learn how to effectively use all of the tools to the point that you can do a better job than Excel
We’re arguing you’re better off just learning python or R or whatever instead of Excel in the first place.

>that's a lot of extra files, steps and boilerplate bullshit to go through for small projects that frankly just aren't that important
Again where is this extra stuff? A python file and a csv? Is that too much extra stuff? And what boilerplate bullshit?

>not to mention the headache of relying on tools that likely wouldn't be included in a standard image on everyone's system
Like what? Name an OS that can’t read a csv if you talking about the python code than that too is installed on all OSs by default but nobody else needs to run it. And if multiple are manipulating the data they can use whatever they want. Like our stats team uses SAS and R I don’t have either on my computer and don’t know how to use SAS but it doesn’t matter to me.

>or the endless potential for missteps and fuckups I can see just thinking of passing CSVs around on a collaborative effort.
You mean like passing around an excel sheet? Or colloaborating with anything at all?

That Excel is something people use for a one-off problem. It's simply not true.

>Where’s the wasted time? Python is faster to write than messing with excel.
Why are you still hung up on Python? That's just one part of the job. Excel isn't just a data analysis tool, it's the database, the data processor and the front-end. This is what I'm getting across. You're not just writing a Python script, you're designing a database to interface it to or working with CSVs for it to process, you're building templates for the reports with LaTeX, then you're stringing all of that bullshit together while distributing god knows what components of it to your various collaborators who will also need those tools available on their systems to work with it, and knowledge of how to work with them and how the whole project fits together. You don't need any of this with Excel.
>We’re arguing you’re better off just learning python or R or whatever instead of Excel in the first place.
That implies learning Excel is the same thing as learning Python or R, which it really isn't.
>Again where is this extra stuff? A python file and a csv? Is that too much extra stuff? And what boilerplate bullshit?
I can't tell if what I'm saying is going over your head or you're thinking of a single really specific kind of problem you've seen Excel used for in a less than efficient manner.
>Like what?
Interpreters and libraries, databases, competent editors, utilities like pdfTeX? None of the shit needed to actually do that kind of project right is going to be included in a typical standard system image at most workplaces.
>You mean like passing around an excel sheet? Or colloaborating with anything at all?
I'm starting to feel like you don't even know what Excel is at this point if you really think it's the exact same thing as dicking around with a bunch of comma-separated values in Notepad.
Oh, no. The implication was that was what it was best for, not that that's actually how people end up using it.

it's used for everything in SMEs

Depends, offices tend to still use excel over proper programming matrices, mainly because people don't know any programming.

I had to once deal with 100's of excel spreadsheets that an electrical company used to record their data.
You're ignoring that large offices still use this shit.

It is the worse and I don't know why programming knowledge isn't mandatory for all specialists.

Excel sheets are our primary tool for dealing with shit at my workplace. We're not programmers, I just happen to know how to use 50% of it and so I'm heralded as this do anything repairman and have to learn about shit on the fly.

Mate, there are going to be so many people in all industries like you, with no formal programming knowledge but some self taught skills that will be relied upon by programming illiterate people.

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I don’t think you get how simple this is. The csv or excel file you’re working with is the database. Python reads in the data processes it and writes it back. A pandas dataframe is organized exactly like an excel spreadsheet. You just interact with it programmatically instead of via a gui. Python is literally just replacing the way you interact with the data you have the same exact output files and that’s all you are passing nothing else. And LaTeX’s only used if you making a presentation, which obviously doesn’t even have to be used you couldnuse powerpoint if you wanted, but either way if you’re presenting your data you need a presentation as well just like if you we’re using excel.

Nobody else needs to know what I’m doing because the output is exactly the same as with excel. At any point anyone who wants to use excel just opens up the files in excel. Nobody else needs these special tools.

I am not implying learning one of these languages is just as easy as excel I’m so it’s worth putting in the effort because it will make your life easier in the long run.

And as with the rest of your comment I’m starting to think you don’t understand how python is used here. Again only passing around a single csv or excel spreadsheet. I personally only interact with it through python. Anyone else can open up the spreadsheet if that’s what they want. Nothing else is passed around there are no other things for anyone to install. I intently make sire all of my outputs are filetypes that anyone can open without special apps.

Another question. I need Excel 2016. Trying to get it legit, since it's the client's money and not mine. MS only sells 2019/365 and that only works on Windows 10. Where do I go?
Office 365 offers 2016 which is supported on Windows 7. If you find an old click to run for 2013 office 365 it will run, install, and activate with an office 365 login.

config.office.com

support.office.com/en-us/article/use-the-office-offline-installer-f0a85fe7-118f-41cb-a791-d59cef96ad1c

I only deal.with business and Enterprise licenses. It could be that home license are 2019 only for office 365.

I think Libreoffice is at a point where many companies could replace microbloat and have the same results without the cost it takes using Office.
Convinving people of this is the issue though

When I saw Libreoffice ability to convert it's odt to regular docx files I knew Office shit was finished.

I still have to use Access for school though because I don't know how to set up the base database in Libre

>I still have to use Access for school though because I don't know how to set up the base database in Libre
They're somewhat similar, in a way. There's a ton of videos made by a guy about Libreoffice base and you always have the guide too if you want to invest time on it