Deep Excel

Actually this should be called DEEP 1-2-3, or perhaps DEEP SHEEEET.

Introduction

One interesting observation about the business world is that managers love Excel. They want to use it to do everything. Except that Excel is not ready to do everything, however Microsoft is trying to beef it up.

Specifically, what is Excel used for?

• Tallying numbers
• Creating forms
• Simulating models
• Analyzing data
• Creating reports

Pretty impressive. So why can't Excel be used to run a business on its own?

• No real groupware access
• Degradation of performance with big data
• Difficulty of customization - to validate
• Difficulty of live database integration - to validate
• No web access

But why is Excel so successful? I think it is actually the spreadsheet model that is the significant success. What are its characteristics?

• Flexible tabular format
• Ease of input
• Ease of formula creation
• Ease of generating graphs
• To a lesser degree, pivot tables and multidimensional data

Does every employee in the company need Excel for his work? I don't think so, especially with data entry operators. Managers are the ones who benefit from it most, and they are the ones who love it most. So it makes sense to focus on integrating it in the company software ecosystem - for their sake.

Numbers as statistics

Numbers in a spreadsheet represent the result of a process or a computation (same thing). This gives us a framework for drilling-down on any number to find the details of the process that produced it. For example, clicking on the yearly expenses amount will open up a sheet made up of monthly expenses, each amount itself clickable to view the details of each month, down to the invoice level. This kind of behaviour is so similar to OLAP that discussing it intuitively or philosophically might be unnecessary.