Comments on: Survey on Excel use

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 07:18:09 +0000

hi, Doug. I answered ‘Never’ to that question! It should be re-worded.

By: Doug Jenkins

Doug Jenkins — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:26:14 +0000

I think “self selection” is inevitable with an open on-line survey.

I really didn’t know how to answer the first line of question 28. I probably should have ticked “never”, since I do create spreadsheets, I never never create them, but instead I ticked “always”.

I also had a problem with the industry question and ended up in “other”.

By: Nigel Heffernan

Nigel Heffernan — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:48:34 +0000

Hmmm…. Posting a link on *this* site will generate traffic from Excel developers: that’ll skew the survey sample with far more Excel/VBA experts than you’d expect in the general population.

Also: the ‘What Industry’ question had categories for education, manufacturing, services, etc. I recorded an ‘Other (please specify)’ with the text ‘Banking / Finance’ – probably the sector with the most intensive spreadsheet usage – but that’s probably going to be hidden in an aggregation of ‘Other’ or misreported if everyone else in banking lists ‘Services’.

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:56:20 +0000

Thanks, Tushar. FWIW, At the end I felt like there should have been a spot to write a comment. If there was I missed it. Maybe my imagination, but, the questions seemed to assume that spreadsheets were standalone entities whereas we use them as part of a system to collect data – the data is then transferred to a database where most analysis is done. So, we end up with little processing & calculations done in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets do some analysis: mostly without formulas (using pivot tables and smart data handling) so that we don’t have formulas that can be wrong, and we don’t need much auditing checks. (That is what we think, anyway!!)