Digital Financial Reporting

Around 1990 or so, I heard someone say that Microsoft Excel was the most used software development environment in the world. Using spreadsheet objects, Excel macros, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) people were building all sorts of software applications including full fledged accounting systems.

Per this article, Microsoft Excel Becomes a Programming Language, Microsoft is increasing Excel's power even more making it a true programming language. Apparently LAMBDA functions are being introduced making Excel Turing complete.  As I understand it, a LAMBDA function is an unnamed function that can be passed round to other functions and the function's logic able to be accessed. (Not really sure what that means frankly.)

Per the article, Excel has 750 million users around the world.  The article states, “Excel formulas are written by an order of magnitude more users than all the C, C++, C#, Java, and Python programmers in the world combined.”

Now, most accountants don't understand how to even write basic VBA; rather they stick to formulas and functions to get work done.  Average accountants likely will not create LAMBDA functions in Excel, but will more likely use LAMBDA functions or even function libraries created by others to get work done.

Ultimately, I believe Excel will suport "semantic spreadsheets" or essentially true multidimensional pivot tables that are grounded in logic rather than presentation oriented artifacts.

In the 1980s, the electronic spreadsheet put 400,000 accounting clerks out of work. But at the same time electronic spreadsheets also created 600,000 accounting jobs.  Over the coming years this scenario will likely play out again.  Repetitive data entry type work will disappear allowing higher value-added analysis type work to become cheaper to perform.  You just need to make sure you have the right skills.