As a programmer who had used Excel for years, seeing my accountant start typing a formula, change sheets, select some cells, go back, repeat, was a learning process. I didn't even know you could do that, and also, I hated it. But it worked very well for him.
I've more recently been exposed to a few spreadsheets that are used to calculate quotes in major insurance businesses when I was asked to create an online process instead, replicating the questions and formula.
They're things of horrifying eldritch beauty. I seem to always find at least one error, and no one I'm allowed to talk to ever really knows how they work since they're built up over years. Those dependency arrows are a life saver.
In my case at least, they probably accounted for it somewhere by adjusting rates elsewhere so it works out. So it's a bit risky to just change, similar to code that is known to be wrong but too hard to change since "everything works".
Oh sweet summer child. You will probably never experience running into the 10 million cell limit on a google sheet with more than a hundred sheets and waiting a quarter of an hour for your spreadsheet to update.
I've more recently been exposed to a few spreadsheets that are used to calculate quotes in major insurance businesses when I was asked to create an online process instead, replicating the questions and formula.
They're things of horrifying eldritch beauty. I seem to always find at least one error, and no one I'm allowed to talk to ever really knows how they work since they're built up over years. Those dependency arrows are a life saver.