alt Hacker News> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app.
Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally accessible.
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Spreadsheets are powerful, but often abused. They are great for economics but horrible for logic.
Most medium to large complex spreadsheets are better implemented in a high level programming language.
Spreadsheets seem useful for people that are scared of programming syntax but quickly become so much less maintainable and janky that I believe its almost always easier to just start with learning to program already.
Especially excel is 100% jank.
Author here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them.
Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.
Spreadsheets are absolutely the right solution for a great many problems. The important thing to recognize is when a problem has outgrown a spreadsheet solution. That’s usually when you start to use a spreadsheet as a database, or when it has more than a handful of users.
It’s a rare spreadsheet that survives its original creator.
Let's not forget: it's pretty unlikely that two orgs come up with the same administration/data-analyis for which they use those spreadsheets, so most of those proposed SaaS applications would have just one customer.
There is of course SAP for common problems.
I’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.
Better security. Better availability. Less chance of losing data.
Assuming the SaaS is implemented competently, of course. Otherwise there's not much advantage.
And often the are unmaintainable because the original author left the company and the users don’t really know what the spreadsheet does which leads to unrecognized bugs and errors especially in spreadsheets with lots of data
Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them.
But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.