Comments for Smurf on Spreadsheets

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Bryan Schmidt

Bryan Schmidt — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:50:41 +0000

I think your main concern should not be uptime, rather: security. My reason for keep certain files local is to keep them more secure (I chose to say ‘more secure’ over just saying ’secure’, because you are always prone to a security breach). If you have a document that you don’t want anyone else ever to see, keep it in your pocket on a USB drive, and never let that drive out of your site. On the other hand, keeping files on the internet is less secure, but there are more and more people doing it, therefore creating more and more targets for hackers, in turn decreasing the chance that your files will be hacked by a hacker at random choice. Now if you have files that others would have reason to get their hands on, for example, instructions on how to build a WMD, or the location of Osama Bin Laden, then you have other issues, but have a higher chance of someone acquiring those without your consent.

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by jonpeltier

jonpeltier — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:02:52 +0000

I’d be concerned about not having control of the content. There are clauses in the TOS that say that Google may share or amend your content for various reasons. If my data is local, I decide if it’s shared or amended, and while a disk error may obliterate my content, I have the responsibility and ability to make local content redundant via backups.

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:49:08 +0000

We are still in the infancy of the cloud era. With seamless offline-online transition, 0.01% downtime will not be a problem. Sure, you can blame Google, but that’s uncalled for.

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Simon

Simon — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:00:21 +0000

Rob
That still happens at places that insist on roaming profiles, if you can’t get your profile you can’t do your work. Happened at a recent client after every patch Tuesday - I was the only one able to work as I work on my own laptop.

As a matter of interest I think most of this stuff is in eternal beta isn’t it - I wouldn’t be that keen to rely on beta software to run my business, would you?

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Rob Bruce

Rob Bruce — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:37:41 +0000

Reminds me of those long gone days when you’d all be sitting at dumb terminals and the cry would go up “mainframe’s gone!” and everyone would get up out of their seats and maybe do some physical filing, step out onto the fire escape for a cigarette (oh, the irony!), or maybe just hang around at the tea machine for a while catching up on gossip.

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Jayson

Jayson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:19:01 +0000

Another question to ponder - word docs on google docs are available offline through Gears. I wonder if they were affected?

Comment on Why I prefer my apps local by Nick Hebb

Nick Hebb — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:20:39 +0000

Agree.

Thanks to you (and my cynical curiosity) I just wasted time looking for Google Apps terms of services. Their Premiere account SLA quotes 99.9% up time for GMail, but I couldn’t find anything about Google Docs.

Their up time is probably good enough for a lot of people, and I think web based word processing is a viable alternate to Word. I’m biased, though, since I’ve always hated Word. But spreadsheets? Nah. The web based ones really suck IMAO.

Comment on Eusprig 2008 by Mike Staunton

Mike Staunton — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:24:43 +0000

The notion of spreadsheet quality has been ab-used by accountants to force standard procedures onto an area whose great attraction is it’s lack of rules and regulations

If you’re concerned purely with numerical errors then you can pretty much eliminate these by getting two independent models built by different people and then check that they agree (or, as I do, write UDFs as an alternative to auditing) - and use array formulas and sorting functions that work in real time and never use manual operations for sorting or the data analysis toolpak functions

Comment on IFERROR by Mike Staunton

Mike Staunton — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:11:50 +0000

This might be an example

If you use Application.MMult to multiply two vectors together that return an array such as {1} - to convert it into a scalar 1, I wrap Application.Sum round it

Comment on IFERROR by Harlan Grove

Harlan Grove — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:08:22 +0000

Not quite the same thing,

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions/browse_frm/thread/5ed958eb02aa66af

Basically, other functions with arguments calling INDIRECT or OFFSET function with array arguments can cause trouble. A contrived example,

X99:
=SUM(OFFSET(A1,SMALL(IF(B$1:B$10>x,C$1:C$10),ROW(X99)-98),,2))

and

Y99:
=SUM(OFFSET(A1,SMALL(IF(B$1:B$10>x,C$1:C$10),ROWS(Y$99:Y99),,2))

usually don’t return the same thing.