Two Very Good Reasons Not To Use Excel

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Hilarious. I’m glad the British Army were’t planning a military campaign using Excel. Who knows where they’d have sent the troops :joy:

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I know, you know, all of us know Excel is a spreadsheet, and that it is all it is. But inside businesses people insists on using Excel :crazy_face:.

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A chainsaw can cut trees much faster than an ax or saw. It seems pretty obvious how to use it. It isn’t. You can injure yourself pretty badly if you don’t know some critical rules to operate it safely

Excel isn’t the problem. It is an excellent tool for what it is meant to do. It is the assumption that people have that they know what they are doing that’s problematic.

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It's not a user issue. It's an Excel issue.

Excel modifies data when it opens a document. It never says, "We have modified the data in this document because we know best". It never says, "Opening this document may cause data to be modified. We will not keep track of the modifications or advise you of them". It could format the data for onscreen display while preserving the actual data. It could advise the user that data meets the criteria it uses to modify data and ask if that is the preferred option. That would allow the user to accept or refuse the changes. It doesn't do any of those things, and it hasn't yet done so.

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Everything you mentioned depends on options and settings. Warnings are optional. Data isn’t modified however it will indeed be typed. You can choose the defaults types that will be applied.

Most people don’t know how to configure it, nor its defaults and their implications. The same way most new FileMaker users or developers don’t know all the gotchas and prerequisite knowledge to make it behave the way they assume it would.

When you take a seat at Excel or Word, you sit yourself in the cockpit of a starship that has a lot of automated commands so you can do basic flying stuff. But turning these switches on doesn’t make you a pilot competent to execute some real life situations flight manœuvres when the need arise. Beyond the presets, people don’t really know what most buttons do and they wing it.

If most users read the 600+ pages Excel or Word bible, they’d fare better.

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