Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: Is Excel Immortal?
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/is-excel-immortal
- Finished date:: 2024-10-05
Highlights
Because, as we all know, Excel is an anti-pattern; a workaround; a broken workflow. It’s a siloed static file; it’s a knot of opaque formulas and intermingled references; it’s a catastrophic error waiting to happen. It’s a cliché joke about final_v2_final_sept30-DO-NOT-EDIT.xls. It’s a problem, and every other data tool is part of the solution: Modern, cloud-based, live, collaborative, versioned, code-based, scalable, and many other compelling attributes that Excel is not. (View Highlight)
why do we refuse to give them up? The answer—obviously, probably—is that these aren’t bugs of Excel, but features. (View Highlight)
In 2022, Snap missed a forecast; the next day, the company was worth 25 percent less. Last month, Bumble said they got their forecasts wrong, and their stock immediately fell by almost 30 percent. (View Highlight)
Sales reps, it turns out, aren’t reliable forecasters of their own deals. Some are chronically optimistic.8 Some sandbag. Some miss telltale signs that a deal is about to fall apart. So, sales managers will often make their own adjustments, based on what they know about the rep and the deal. They’ll manually tinker with things: This deal will probably come in at half of what is forecasted; this deal probably will slip to next quarter; this deal is likely to close, even though the rep is nervous about it. And they don’t want to publish all this offroading in some canonical dashboard that’s broadcast to the entire office—it is the hidden thumb on the scale, for executives’ eyes only. (View Highlight)
Moreover, sales leaders want versions of their forecast. They don’t want to see the numbers in Salesforce, as they are today; they want a saved, immutable sept_27_forecast_pessimistic.xls, to compare to this weeks’s oct_4_forecast_without_jetblue.xls. Live, mysteriously-changing data is bad. Collaboration is bad. Restrictions on how to manipulate data are bad. Any sort of abstraction that forces sales leaders to work through some drag-and-drop visualization builder that muddies how, exactly, the fields for “deal amount,” “opportunity ARR,” and “win-probability-adjusted revenue forecast” are summed up is bad. Excel—orphaned from all other realities, saved to desktop, and barbarically updated via emails and saved as…—is good. (View Highlight)
One way to think about Excel is as a database and a BI tool, all packaged into a single file. (View Highlight)
There’s a layer of abstraction between your charts and your data, and that abstraction can be unnerving. (View Highlight)
Excel doesn’t put anything between you and the raw data. You can look at a table of numbers, look at the chart you made, and it immediately makes sense how you got from one to the other. No doubt, Excel has a learning curve, but because of closeness between data and result, it’s a much more intuitive learning curve than other tools. And a better Excel would probably have to be just as direct. (View Highlight)