Comments on: PETE- People for the Ethical Treatment of Excel

By: bob

bob — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:31:29 +0000

worst i have seen was a user rung me up to ask how many characters an excel cell could hold. He was typing a letter and had reach the limit. I was gobsmacked.

Sharepoint FTW, lets replace excel except for statistical purposes. Not as a database tool

By: Larry Watters

Larry Watters — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:02:20 +0000

I’ve seen these same user issues with Excel queries to M2M. I created a SQL Stored Procedure, determined the tables the users really needed, and created a subset of those tables (eliminating fields they usually do not use or understand) with an underscore prefix “_SOMAST”.
I run a scheduled task on the hour which calls the stored procedure, and moves these files out of the production environment onto a different instance of SQL. Now they cannot affect production, and still can do all the runaway SQL queries they want;)
Just a thought!

By: All the Little Ants are Marching… | Made2Mentor

All the Little Ants are Marching… | Made2Mentor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:10:59 +0000

[...] back to the accounting folks. This kind of behavior is mind-blowing to me as much as Excel Hell. Users can be almost robotic in their actions. They don’t think about their actions nor question [...]

By: Don't Bother? | Made2Mentor

Don't Bother? | Made2Mentor — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:26:50 +0000

[...] requirement puts him into what I call “Excel Hell.” This is one of the reasons I formed PETE. They use ODBC spreadsheets to pull their data from M2M. As I watched, he went down his long list [...]

By: When Being Right May be Wrong. | Made2Mentor

When Being Right May be Wrong. | Made2Mentor — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:03:46 +0000

[...] in my company was tedious and time consuming. As is typical, the method used to track this was Excel Hell. Every week someone would run the Received Goods (RPREGO), Inventory On-Hand by Location (RPINOH), [...]

By: Report Guidelines: Exporting Reports | Made2Mentor

Report Guidelines: Exporting Reports | Made2Mentor — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:35:20 +0000

[...] an aside, I have talked in the past about Excel Hell and often that hell is caused by spreadsheet exports from M2M or other ERP systems. For example, [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:02:58 +0000

I just read this. Funny stuff and so true. We have spreadsheets all over the place here. They track so much stuff outside of M2m because it’s hard to customize.

By: Jason Griffith

Jason Griffith — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:26:50 +0000

I’ll support PETE.

You can never get people away from Excel, but I’ll take 80gigs of Excel sheets over 20kb of Access any day of the week.

My love for Excel goes deep, but my hatred for Access runs far deeper.

I use Excel a lot, and in many cases probably more than I should. But, I use it that much because of how many other people around me insist on using it as well. It doesn’t matter what kind of report I build for them or how many different formats I can put it in, every single one of them will have it exported out to Excel. I can spend 20 minutes setting it up in Excel/VBA, or I can spend a few hours getting it set up some sort of reporting service. Since it all ends up in the same place I just save myself the time and effort.

So rather than spending my time designing reports in SSRS or the like, I spend my time writing VBA code to mimic a report and its subsequent exportation out to Excel. I clean it up, put it in the right format, throw some charts and graphs in where needed, etc, etc.

The most horrendous abuse I have ever seen in Excel is one that I still work on from time to time that I helped a guy from the ITToolBox.com forums set up. It’s a massive workbook that keeps track of payroll, attendance, vacation, clock-in/outs, and several other things related to HR functions.

It has 16 forms tied into various parts of it that mimic data entry to save the user the effort of scrolling down the pages. There is a sheet for every employee in the company, each one listing every day of every week of every year that they have worked here.

The thing is massive and it’s being done by a guy with very, very little programming knowledge. He does what he can, sends me an email with his problems, and then runs off with his answer using forums as best he can to fill in any blanks I may have left and fill in details that I don’t

By: Rick Duffin

Rick Duffin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:08:20 +0000

David,

I have been trying to educate users on the use of a database vs a spreadsheet for many years. I am at least wise enough now to start with “Well you really did a great job putting together that spreadsheet and I can see you spent a lot of time learning all the ins and outs, but …” However, I have perhaps been too quick to use a database in instances where a SS would be a better fit!

Most agregious – a local pizza company with numerous locations and all financials on SS’s that are snail mailed to headquarters and than smooshed together.