Excel for life?

We all use Excel

When you ask financial analyst, controlling analyst, business analyst, production analyst, sales analyst, marketing analyst, etc. they tell you yes they do. But, if you ask them if they enjoy it? Hell no! They can’t stand this ‘project11_2000ver.22(03)-final_EDITED_official-v2.xlsx‘ type of files. However they try to master formatting cells or creating of pivot tables by attending to various trainings led by ‘Excel magicians’.

Little story

Let me tell you a little conversation which I had during job interview. I was applying for data analyst position and in my résumé I pointed out my knowledge of Excel. Managing Director who interviewed me said that he recognise only three groups of Excel users:

1. Regular users
2. Those who can write VB macro for themselves
3. Creators of Excel

I answered that I’m in the first one, but whenever I will need to add some functionality I can jump into the second group. Also I would never like to belong to Micro$oft early days staff. I said that in my opinion people like Bill G. done more bad than good. Also I would like to put perspective to mentioned conversation. It was production company with over thousand people, they had implemented MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, and almost every office worker was dealing with at least one excel spreadsheet.

Moral

Why I’m mentioning this? Because I think that too many companies pick Excel as way to go when comes to any data flow.
For sure this spreadsheet based structures have their place for particular tasks, but there should be choice for switching tools used for data manipulation.