I don’t think it’s fixable. Excel enables chaotic “development” and it just happens. In the end we either left them with a system they ordered or bailed out cause it wasn’t worth it.
Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.
And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.
a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and
b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal.
It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.
I am not respectful of excel at all, true. I could see your perspective, if it wasn’t a client who comes by itself(!) begging to do something with their spreadsheets cause key roles spend all day maintaining these, blocking further growth or mergers. Maybe I should not have called it crap out if respect to a client, but that’s what it was from the design pov, no reason to spare a word. I didn’t like it cause no one likes to dig in such sort of legacy. You treat the failure rate as an excel good indicator, well that may seem true until you get yet another call for help. It’s a failure rate of excel. I agree that we should have just bailed out by default and left them to sales sharks. At some point that’s what I did basically, said no to yet another “project”, cause these were crappy low hanging fruits that no one else wanted to deal with, not interesting jobs. Idk how it all assembles into “excel good” in some minds. As if companies just called integrators out of boredom because everything they’ve built in excel works.
You're saying Excel failed, when the work was mostly getting done, if inefficiently.
You showed up, unburdened by Excel, and soon quit ("bailed out" -- your words) because the projects were "crappy", "not interesting", "no one wanted to deal with". Yea, boring, crappy projects are a big, but essential part of business!
Lets be clear, YOU failed. Processes built upon Excel are often messy and inefficient, that's well-established, but just like in this example, attempting to replicate the processes without using Excel often implodes entirely.
My success rate was around 2/3. That after I finished they returned to excel is your unfounded assumption (also demonstratively ignorant of what it takes).
Anyway, if you advise your clients to build on excel, I wish them luck, and wish you, when they fail to grow or simply sustain, to be successful in explaining them that it’s alright and integrators bad and they must just continue. Cause clearly this strategy works for you somehow. Make it work for them with the same energy as here and it’s done.
Edit: to clear misunderstandings, I didn’t fix their spreadsheets. I extracted knowledge and processes from there and from users and built a new system after discussing how it all and their ideas check together.