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I wish this site had emojis so I could spam the facepalm emoji.

You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.

The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.

Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?



Because Excel and Sheets exist, most businesses don’t bother with custom software for things that basic spreadsheets can handle, which is a lot.

Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.


But many companies also misuse Excel for tasks for which it's a poor fit. They also use it for data entry that has nothing to do with financial calculations, and Excel is not suitable for maintaining data. One of my big frustrations has been watching business people put literally everything in Excel and then mailing that around.


> You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations

There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".

But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it

> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason

Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.




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