I thought it might be nice to start a weekly community discussion. I know the community is young and there are not very many of us active yet. So I hope this will give us an opportunity once a week to have a discussion and share our opinions on a given topic and grow the activity within the community.
This week's discussion is based on a statement that was made to me this week. The context was around the topics of spreadsheets control, producers, and risk management.
it will not be long before Excel is deemed too risky for many corps.
Would you agree or disagree with this statement? Why?
Use the comments below and share your thoughts. Don't forget the community rules, and please respect the opinions of others.
I look forward to reading the replies
Hi Paula! I have to admit that I'm pretty confused by this statement. I've been using Excel at companies for, well, decades. I've used Google Sheets and Smartsheets at an enterprise level, but Excel has always been available.
I assume there's a lot to this... but is Excel really that risky?
Did you know that spreadsheets caused the collapse of the entire Jamaican banking system in the late ,90's?
You might like to check out some of the 'horror' stories on the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group and then decide how risky it can be https://peakd.com/hive-102332/@paulag/disucss-it-will-not-be-long-before-excel-is-deemed-too-risky-for-many-corps
Although Excel has its risks. I don't think companies would be able to avoid using it, even if they tried.
OMG? Really? I didn't know that at all...
Was that the link you meant to paste? It's the link for this particular post.
I work with SAP, which tries to safeguard a lot of data, but people still download it and run it through Excel because that's what they know.
So sorry, the wrong link indeed http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm
That's my experience too, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of companies spend on awesome software, people still just dump to excel
It would be interesting if you could provide some recent justification for this. It seems I read only the bottom half of an article.
Its just a statement up for discussion. But to give you some justification, Excel spreadsheets are only as good as the designer of the sheet and are prone to errors. Over the years these errors have cost billions to organisations. Yet Excel is the most used software worldwide.
Some specific examples would be good in the article. You are saying things without evidence. Thanks for hearing out my concern.