Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0180227357
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/28/019235/seven-years-later-airbus-is-still-trying-to-kick-its-microsoft-habit
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/microsoft_airbus_migration/
> As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital.
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> Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/microsoft_airbus_migration/
Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:5, Insightful)
> Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
Time for a database, people. You are using the wrong tool for the job.
Re: Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:2)
20 million cells in a spreadsheet?
Re: 20 million cells in a spreadsheet? (Score:1)
which matches their brain-cell count
Often Excel _is_ the right tool for the job. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Time for a database" depends a lot on what they are doing with the spreadsheet. If it's inventory or asset tracking, then yes... wrong tool for the job. However, workbooks like this are often used for forecasting and other financial models which don't map well to databases because there are cascading formulas being applied (I've seen sheets that take minutes to update).
Yes you can do it with Pandas, numpy, etc but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well. Porting to something else is time consuming, expensive and risky, even a minor difference in precision or rounding on sheets like these can throw numbers off by millions of dollars/euros/etc. It's also usually more difficult to debug. With the Excel sheets you can see the numbers at each step/stage and an experienced user can pretty quickly identify where something is going wrong.
My background is programming and when I first came across these type of sheets my first reaction was NOPE. But having worked with financial teams on them, I game to realize I was wrong. Excel is exactly what they need. That's changing, more finance staff have experience with python and equivalent data modeling tools but don't be so quick to judge.
Re: (Score:2)
> ..Porting to something else is time consuming, expensive and risky, even a minor difference in precision or rounding on sheets like these can throw numbers off by millions of dollars/euros/etc.
And yet, no one assumes this problem can exist at scale in Excel?
Are the latest versions of Excel tracking to 42 decimal places and offering rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch, or am I missing something as to how certain flavors (rhymes with sex sell) of inaccuracy are perfectly acceptable in business?
Re: Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:2)
Some people are just used to working in this way. The old timers.
But there's also the fact that the numbers in the spreadsheet are just half of the story. Those people need the ability to tweak those numbers and instantly recalculate tens/hundreds of other things.
Using a database would require a very extensive and always-changing frontend which would be an enormous expense.
Re: (Score:2)
> Some people are just used to working in this way. The old timers.
> But there's also the fact that the numbers in the spreadsheet are just half of the story. Those people need the ability to tweak those numbers and instantly recalculate tens/hundreds of other things.
Uh huh.
And every financial auditor knows damn well what is implied by a “tweak” feature.
Only reason they don’t call that shit out, is job security.
There are other limitations, like versioning (Score:4, Interesting)
Google docs suite doesn't support embedding objects in the single file document, at best you can insert a link which cannot be versioned together with the document. If I check-in a PowerPoint document with Visio diagram, that version is saved, no matter when you recall it. If I have version of Google slides presentation with some link to draw.io, it's never a fixed thing.6 months later I grab that same google deck version and it's old slides with new diagrams. Sure I can screen cap draw.io and insert it into the google slide deck, but then editing it is a royal pain in the ass. Then there are some quirks like on a Mac, Google docs will disable the mouse right click menus whenever on a screen that is shared via Teams.
Evergreen news (Score:2)
Rocks are hard, water can cure dehydration, giant over budget IT project facing delays, and breathing oxygen will help you live longer. Please feel free to recycle the headlines to the right as often as you want, they'll still be just as true.
Sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to
20 million cells in a spreadsheet?!? (Score:2)
So they can build airliners but haven't heard of databases?
Excel is so opaque, how do they debug their formulae?
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, most no-one using spreadsheets has any idea they are actually doing programming. In this case, on this scale, real system programming, not trivial scripting. They have never heard of methods and safeguards. Ask them how they document their code and they will stare blankly at you. Ask how they test it, Same. Ask them how they manage versions, same.
The result is their work is full of errors, if you look hard enough. But they have no idea in the maze of loops, iterations and go-tos that
Re: (Score:2)
These types of people know two things:
- How to use Excel
- That if anyone finds out what they do in Excel really is, and how easily it could be programmed as a report from real data, they would be out of a job.
Instead they get titles like "Chief Financial Officer", "Controller" and "Senior Accountant".
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Sinclair, U. I'd probably change that to "communicate" instead of understand.
A lot of people are simply used to MS (Score:2)
Especially administration, but also mqny IT departments tends to be MS centric. It is not enough to decide at management level to switch, but you have root out blockers. Especially in IT, you have to let go of a lot of Windows people, who more or less consciously will work against the transition. On the user side you can easily just say, they have to live with it (or leave the company). And then you have the cost of porting lots of admin tools tied to MS Office.and Windows.
Having a spreadsheet with 20M cells .. (Score:2)
--. is criminally insane.
It should be in a database.
Who ever created it should be ordered to check all the calculations with a 1960's mechanical calculator each time there is an update.
Big, BIG companies should know better (Score:2)
Big MEGAcorps should really know better.
IT may not be their bread and butter, but goddam it, these sized corps have resources. They can take the code base for LibreOffice or whatever Open Sourced tool they have and mandate THAT as the corporate standard.
They can even run their own cloud. That's pretty well how AWS started ... spare capacity.
10 person mum and dad store? Nah, I'm going to cut some slack and say "buy one of these pre-canned products".
The MEGACorps can then have their own sub-company to do the
Worthwhile things can take a while (Score:2)
While Google is probably not the best choice, the move also causes increased flexibility. They will now, for a while, be able to move again with relatively low effort.
That the move is difficult just shows how direly needed it is.
Excel is a platform. (Score:2)
Or at least it's used as one.
And that does have it's advantages, believe it or not.
Any untrained office worker can open an Excel sheet and run the app that's built with it without any extra training or security and privilege stuff getting in the way. Office workers can build their own logic without having to shop around for some developer to take care of their problem and the ERP budget doesn't have to be touched. And it's even modern purely functional programming. ... That's how you eventually get Shadow
Google? wtf (Score:4, Insightful)
Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.
Re: (Score:3)
> "Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like."
Yeah, really.
But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?
Anyway, I had to check... LibreOffice Calc supports more than 1 billion cells from 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Hope the machine has a lot of RAM if trying to push that :)
Re: (Score:2)
Departmental level bodge jobs done by someone in management who at a *stretch* might try to migrate to Access instead of a real DB when pressured to create a better solution because the current one is choked and falling down.
Re: Google? wtf (Score:2)
My thoughts exactly!
Switching from something with more privacy and capability to an inferior product, while handing all company data to "do no evil" Google!
Do companies care so little for trade secrets these days?
Capability. (Score:2)
> Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.
Guess that depends on if the like feels like this is more a you problem rather than a capability anyone should be meeting:
> ..can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells..
Screw the memory issues. 20 million cell spreadsheets should get you drawn and quartered.
Re: (Score:2)
But it still means some diversification in the more general landscape. It also means they can now, for a while, move again with lower effort.