You Shouldn’t Use a Spreadsheet for Important Work (I Mean It)
28th May 2014
What is remarkable regarding Piketty’s work, is that he backed his work with comprehensive data and thorough analysis. Unfortunately, like too many people, Piketty used speadsheets instead of writing sane software. On the plus side, he published his code… on the negative side, it appears that Piketty’s code contains mistakes, fudging and other problems.
In other words, he skipped a key element of any software design process: code review.
Simply put, spreadsheets are good for quick and dirty work, but they are not designed for serious and reliable work.
- All professional software should contain extensive tests… how do you know that your functions do what you think they do if you do not test them? Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing.
- Spreadsheets make code review difficult. The code is hidden away in dozens if not hundreds of little cells… If you are not reviewing your code carefully… and if you make it difficult for others to review it, how do expect it to be reliable?
- Spreadsheets encourage copy-and-paste programming and ad hoc fudging. It is much harder to review, test and maintain such code.
UPDATE: An opposing viewpoint here.