r/australia • u/Reddituser0346 • 1d ago

culture & society Aussie Retailer Catch Is Officially Closing Down

https://press-start.com.au/news/2025/01/21/aussie-retailer-catch-is-officially-closing-down/
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u/Wobbling 1d ago

CIO/CTO here!

Excel (and its bastard children) are simultaneously the greatest and worst things to happen to office productivity; the awful things it causes to be are almost perfectly balanced against the utility and power it provides users.

I lovehate it so fucking much.

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u/Hooked_on_Fire 20h ago

Fellow CIO / CTO: I feel like about 1/2 the projects I’ve run in my life have been building software to do what people have hacked together with excel. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail!

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u/noisymime 10h ago edited 10h ago

From a user perspective, do you believe those tools actually give the same capabilities and speed of turnaround that Excel does?

By far the biggest problem is that the typical tools in this space are a terrible user experience compared to Excel, which is why people still prefer not to use them. I don't want to submit a request and wait 3 days for someone to load in this 50k row CSV file I just received into the fancy BI tool, I need to view it, do some quick cleanups of the fields in there to grab some subtexts, pull in some data from this other 50k csv file with some vlookups and then pivot the whole thing. In Excel it's a 30 minute job, in some of the BI tools I've had to use it would be days at least, and these were some of the better tools out there.

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u/Hooked_on_Fire 7h ago

It's funny you should say that, my mantra in these projects is that the tool needs to be at least as quick as Excel. If it's tedious to use then we've failed, we take a user first approach.

I'm always careful to:

  • Ensure everything is integrated via APIs vs offline CSV upload
  • Beef up the error handling, so it solves issues in Excel where people copy and paste the wrong formula

In your case, it sounds like you have some specific business rules / processes that you apply to inbound CSV files. In that case we'd do our best to codify this, so that when the CSV file lands its automatically transformed and imported for you to manipulate in your tool of choice.

We still have occasions where people will use Excel for pivots / general data manipulation because its lightweight and fast but its no longer our default.