Current Events > Why aren't MS Excel-related careers just automated?

(+) Yeah! (+)

This makes no sense to me. If you were going to earnestly try to automate any field, wouldn't generic number crunching be it? I read shit on Reddit all the time about people who do nothing at their jobs because they figured out how to make batch scripts that do their work for them.

Same reason we still have middle managers.

It's actually extremely difficult to automate excel. It's way easier and cheaper to put all that data into some kind of business intelligence software and automate that. If you have to specifically use Excel you're going to run into a lot of annoying bullshit including VBA which isn't useful anywhere outside of Microsoft office.

Dont worry. Once all the boomers retire they will start to eliminate jobs that can be automated.

I'm in Excel all the time "crunching numbers" it's not a particularly automatable thing. Like the Excel piece is just a tool to help the person do the crunching. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely have Excel substantially do a lot of heavy lifting but actually turning that into a usable product involves people.

You would have to pay someone more to create and maintain the automation.

Tyranthraxus posted...

It's actually extremely difficult to automate excel. It's way easier and cheaper to put all that data into some kind of business intelligence software and automate that. If you have to specifically use Excel you're going to run into a lot of annoying bullshit including VBA which isn't useful anywhere outside of Microsoft office.

This. Excel, itself, requires an input method that isn't particularly conducive to being automated. It's easy to automate Excel-esque things, but if you want something done in Excel, specifically... At this point in time, it's easier to just hire somebody.