Most small companies don’t need AI to be more efficient. They need Excel.

I’ve already had two cases where a friend asked me to show them how AI can help them run their company better. In each case it turned out that they needed Excel. Specifically an excel export from one system, some bulk editing, and an excel import into another system.

(I understand the satire in this article but this is a serious post)

> They need Excel.

They should also learn how to use it. Too many times I see people manually sorting rows by cutting and inserting them, when filters are just two clicks away! Filter it, copy the table, save it. Done. 3 hour job done in less than 10 seconds.

Or using pivot tables (i.e. for filtering reports with thousands of lines to find string which occurred the most and sort them by the occurrence).

Or automatically deduplicating rows (remove duplicates - choose columns, click and done.)

And the most outrageous cases of being Excel illiterate are people using calculator on the table and writing results back into Excel. These folks are already too far gone. Nobody can help them.

They used to say this exactly about databases. Small companies usually only need a spreadsheet.

Clearly I've been overengineering by using code to remotely control industry hardware in real-time. I should've been using a spreadsheet all along!

The article says that code is designed for computers to read, not humans, when in fact code is designed for both.

Spreadsheets and code have their respective applications.

One of my early gigs was in a, for my country and the standards at the time (90s), large factory; they ran almost everything on Excel and Access. From the erp, hrm, crm, entry gates, phone system, truck loading bays, industrial systems if they could be accessed via Windows, cafetarias PoSs etc. VBA plugged into everything with the sysadmin doing 'version management' of 1000s of evolving data mixed with code files on networking (Novell I think when I was there) shares. They kept that up for quite a while until the sysadmin got ill; I was there to fix some issues in Access because he could not do it fulltime now. They replaced everything for far more expensive and inflexible erp and control software; it did no longer depend on one person working 247 though.

In case people don't realize, this is satire.

It's the best kind of satire, because it's based in a bit of truth!

laugh all you want, but every modern drug probably owes its existence to Excel hah

All this is great and fantastic until you hit Excel’s row limit.

i know its inteneded to be satire but it kinda isnt?

well excel changed the world, many more organizations run on excel and the companies that dont run excel in the same field are probably having a harder time. so yes i guess?

also ai and excel are different things?

Ridiculous comparison

The Excel flip lands. AI is a tool. People could adapt and use it, instead a lot of the panic sounds like resistance dressed up as analysis.