Lonely Lion

How could you improve a shark? Laser beams. Frick’n lasers!

But in all seriousness, and I realize this is a tangent to the point of your article, but it’s something we’ve struggled with in our research work, anyway, spreadsheets are not, IMHO, an evolutionary masterpiece as they stand.

I think you could make the argument that they’ve certainly evolved to fill a certain niche and that there isn’t a better solution out there in all cases, thus selection pressure hasn’t been able to greatly mold them in recent history (to keep going with the evolution idea), but any argument which claims that spreadsheets are incredibly good at all that they’re used for is problematic.

For all of the power that spreadsheets give people, they’re also problematic. How? Why? Human error and bugs, of course. A quick googling yeilds a lot of interesting reading:

from:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/22/managing_spreadsheet_fraud/

“So how much money is the Fortune 500 wasting annually? It is a simple sum:” … ” [t]hat amounts to just shy of three quarters of a billion dollars. And is that anywhere near realistic? No. It is probably safe to say that corporate America, for example, loses in excess of $10bn annually through the misuse and abuse of spreadsheets. That’s a big number: it suggests a problem worth managing.”

Also, see:
http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/index.htm for a whole discussion of issues from errors to compliance challenges.

A choice quote: “Not long ago, recommended practice in medicine involved the use of leeches. This and other dubious practices continued for generations because there was no science to shed light on ineffective (and often harmful) recommended practices. I hate to say it, but I think that recommended spreadsheet practices are at the same stage of development today. ” ( http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/Rant-on-science-in-SS-BPs.pdf )

– Sometimes stuff sticks around for a while because we don’t know any better… (e.g.: asbestos, lead paint, the Chicago Cubs, to name a few)

Spreadsheets are as prone to errors or more prone than regular programming tasks and yet we’ve got all sorts of tools for coding that just aren’t available for spreadsheets (i.e. testing strategies/tools, IDEs (you can make arguments about this point, I guess), easy revision control (try getting a simple diff of a spreadsheet represented in text form that makes clear sense), the list goes on…)

Now, as a simple data management tool or as a way to do a quick one-off sort of thing, spreadsheets are decent, but to do anything complex, their value rapidly decreases and the liability they pose increases.

Okay, now I’ll go read everything past your second paragraph, because I’m sure that your actual topic is really cool and that you didn’t mean for anyone like me to go off like this on spreadsheets =)

nice article, but described way is very primitive. CSV is good to export some data and import them. It`s great to exchange data between applications. not to display them. usually “row” export export is first request from users. secondly we have requirement “I would like export formated data, with header, merged cells, different fonts”. and it well cause full rewriting. It is better return usual html page with table in it. set content type and excel will open it.

@cencio,

I didn’t realize that…good tip, thanks. Any idea if it works with earlier versions of Excel? Or is it only the latest and greatest? Regardless, great tip. Thanks.