You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]
In my line of work I often see tech vendors and consultants trying to plan infrastructure changes using Excel (or worse, tables in Word, but we won&#x27;t go into that). The results are horrendous.<p>They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and additions until it feels good. There&#x27;s lots of highlighting, different coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for sums and counts in an ad-hoc way.<p>The end plan <i>always</i> contains mistakes and omissions that really hurt during deployment time.<p>The correct way requires discipline: immutable input sheets (from machine-generated config dumps), a parameter sheet, output tables (with consistent usage of formulas with &quot;$&quot; notation to lock rows and columns), and cross checks with conditional highlighting.<p>Unfortunately this is <i>really hard</i> for people without programming instincts&#x2F;experience. Good job security I guess. But if you can do it, it&#x27;s both faster and safer than the manual free-form method.