alt Hacker NewsIs this stuff… like, good? I don’t know anything about the MS ecosystem. If you could start from scratch, would using something more like Python, pandas, that sort of stuff, be viable?
Replies
No, none of it is good, excel is basically a bad tool for almost any job. There almost always exist a better thing for everything people use excel for.
But excel has inertia, and it's the only programming non-programmers are able, or rather willing, to do. So we're basically stuck with it.
And yes, I consider crafting and maintaining excel workbooks programming, even if no VBA is involved.
You're not going to get non technical coworkers like the finance department entering their data or reports in pandas. So it depends on how much labor you want to put in helping them do it, I guess?
Excel works, the VBA macros with random business rules work, people with business knowledge know how to use it, the workflows are set up.
If we were starting from nothing it wouldn't be built, but the value of what already exists is massive.