IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won't as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
Whew, glad you didn't say it wasn't a password manager...
My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding...
My current boss who said she was retiring about 5 years ago (but didn't...) used Excel as a password manager but would create her own little "boxes" of merged cells, then when she wanted to clear the contents of a merged cell she'd select the whole area and delete entire rows and columns, but she wouldn't notice, so later then complain that the Gen Z office admin was "deleting important passwords" and when I pointed out that it was the boss doing that she'd either deny it, or repeat her process while paying closer attention then blame "Microsoft doing stupid things with this new Excel, it didn't do this before the cloud" (don't ask me why she thought her excel 2010 was on the cloud, other than the fact she saved this doc in Dropbox)
Said scape goat office admin transferred everything to OneNote when we did get finally get Microsoft 365, so at least the boss would stop accidentally deleting everything when trying to edit one thing.
Then the boss started to get annoyed at me for all my "stupid and impossible passwords", how dare I have passwords like "nf6oO!D4t^q%Tnr3" and "&x#5Fr$s68iETYof". I asked why it's a problem, just copy and paste, my passwords are like that because I generate mine within a password manager and I'm not changing my process, I'm already heavily compromising by putting my passwords in her silly OneNote so she can log into accounts I've set up.
She had all her passwords in this document, but she wasn't even using it to copy paste. She'd look at the document to read the password then type it out manually....
I showed her my password manager so she'd understand how useful it is, turns out our MSP had already set one up for her! But she didn't like it because "it always asks me to check a code on my phone just to see my passwords, it takes too long to faff around with my phone, OneNote is just as secure because it's in the Dropbox and you can't get into the Dropbox without the password."
Lord help me.
Lord help her! How has she even made it this far in life? 😂
Haha, I know right!
Our industry was notoriously late to go digital, even in 2020 I heard of organisations physically mailing out letters to clients because no one had an established individual user email system
Our industry (community centres and non accredited adult education) dominated by grannies, retireees who volunteer, and council workers that burnt out and don't care to change the status quo the grannies have set up.
I think my boss used to be sharper in her prime (or rather, I know she was, because I've seen examples of her work from 20 years ago), but she's in her mid seventies, and the lead poisoning and chemo-brain have taken their toll on her.
My old company had a saved spreadsheet on the O:drive called "Passwords"
Our users have had access to Password Safe, then Keepass, then LastPass, now Keeper. Guess what still pops up in screen shares.
Years ago, I've recommended KeePass to a girl from marketing who kept a long list of passwords on paper on her desk. She forgot the master pass after a week or so. That was the end of my trust in users' ability to maintain a safe environment.
Haven't used keepass but it should ask for master password at least once a day right? Or did she not require any credentials for more than a week?
Keepass will autolock after a minute or so, she used that pass few times a day...
My dad uses it as a password manager
I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.
Spreadsheets don't require a UI to be built. People don't have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.
I'm an IT guy too and I'm the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya....might as well just use spreadsheets.
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
It's more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
I see you're in enterprise.
MS Access is a thing...
And it's terrible.
It wasn't that bad in 2003. Too bad it's still stuck there.
exactly this. 200%
Power Platform with dataverse is essentially this
Technically even Access would make more sense. Isn't that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Granted, SQL is still better but I've worked in government where you're lucky to be using digital sheets at all.
I specifically avoided mentioning Access as I have hear horror stories about it when it goes too far.
All those stories are 100% true. And when someone did end up hosting an Oracle based SQL database, they'd pull from it in Access and it'd take several hours for one query. My R code did the same in about 10 seconds.
It's not good software. Lol
Access has its uses, need a database to catalog your (parents) physical photo albums, or perhaps you want to have a database for recipies at home to make them easier to find, then in those cases Access should be fine if you are willing to maintain it.
Reminding me of corrupted .mdb files means I need more alcohol tonight to pacify the demons in my head
Isn't that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Not sure about the current state of things since I haven't used MS Office in decades, and I believe it's entirely made of web apps now, but Access definitely used to be extra. As in, there always were at least two editions of Office, one that included Access and one that didn't. And the former was significantly more expensive.
I actually know this one. Access is available through the MS Office 2019 bundle officially and they pretend it's not really there with 365, but if you have Office365 you can download the app version to work offline. Access still doesn't show up on the main list in the app, but if you search it's there. There's also a way to search it in apps online in 365 but it just downloads it and only runs in the app.
I recently went back to school and the basic degree requirements necessitated an intro to CIS class. It was just a glorified MS suite class. But I had an interesting time figuring out how to get to Access and no where online makes it clear. That's the main reason I typed this out. Maybe some day someone else will have the same issue and this comment will show up on a search and be able to help them. You're welcome future person!
OF COURSE the actual devil would know such things... LOL
Its not that simple.
Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
But, generally, people know it is a horrible workflow and is prone to failure. But there is no time and resources available to revamp the entire system. Because that likely involves going "offline" for the migration as well as the subsequent retraining. Its no different than the technical debt we all laugh and cry about. We know that server is held together with chewing gum and shoe strings but we don't have time or authorization to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. We are just hoping it doesn't fail at a bad time.
If you're lucky? You can periodically export the excel sheet to a database (sql or access, it doesn't matter). You are still doing things wrong but you at least have a recovery option at that point. But, if you can't, you are more or less fucked and know it.
As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
Shit, I'll mock them. I'm too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I'll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I'm a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
It's great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn't see this on the "not a..." list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!
I love the idea of xls applications, that's really evil!
Correct, it's for tracking work items.
You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
It's not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I'll reject that shit without reading it and type "lmaoooooooo..." To the review character limit.
My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn't make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.
It depends on the scale. I'll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.
They said inappropriate.
I just thought they were depressed by the things they've seen and needed some inspiration
If you wanted to inspire them, you should have shown them this.
The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me...
What's the use case?
Like for anything financial, Excel files are preferable.
Although I will say this. Companies are lying when they say they want Excel exports. They don't. They want CSV but they don't know the difference.
That's... a normal usecase? Importing exporting excel files?
Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
That makes sense if they're transitioning people who have been doing it the old way for 20 years.
ITT, very salty IT guys...
I'd rather folks use Excel then some home made stuff. That's the real nightmare fuel. VB, not .net, just VB, from 1995. You'll beg to have bad Excel after you deal with that stuff. 😵😱😭
The scripting in Excel is VBA, which is VB6. So, basically what I'm saying is that you can have both!
In .xls .. no thanks
My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
To me its amazing they've been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a "proper" system. Kind of assuming it wasn't a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
Migration is expensive and time consuming so wouldn't be surprised if laziness played a major role in that even if its obviously a problem
That's true and I've seen this thing a lot to the point people were buying assorted spare parts for a refrigerator sized server circa 1998 almost 20 years later while the entire business was complaining about how slow it was for a majority of those years. Our data center dates back to the 80s so there's some great artifacts still lurking around.
Oh it absolutely did not work properly. We lost a $300M lawsuit because the system would bill clients wrong.
rofl that's kind of amazing then. I'm used to legacy stuff that nobody wants to touch because it's functioning how it's supposed to.
My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn't even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
The software my company makes still uses VB5 for the front end 🙃
🍻🫗
Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps to deliver rapid feature turnaround to customers, generating a million dollars in revenue:
Our finance department, tracking that revenue in a 700MB excel spreadsheet which is version controlled by a 13 year old email thread:
How in the world does that spreadsheet even open?
wtf are ipynb apps?
It's when you have Python and breakfast.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it
Edit - it seems y'all should save up for a sense of humor anyway
Y'all python devs have been getting cocky lately lol
Python: this is a weapon of terror. It is meant to intimidate the enemy.
C++: This is a weapon of war. It is meant to kill the enemy.
Comment replies should be somewhat relevant to the topic
I love this part: "To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap."
There is an ODBC driver for Excel. Not to put data into Excel -- To get it back out, treating it as if it were a database.
This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
My dad asked if I could look at a spreadsheet he uses at work, maybe fix a couple of things that he has to manually adjust. This meme is frightfully accurate, the earliest parts of this thing are older than some of the junior devs on my team.
I've been on both sides of this as a sysadmin for almost 15 years then as a data analyst. IT has so many requirements and barriers and any end user tool you have free access to will possibly be an easier route than procuring a boutique solution through IT. Yes of course IT will do it proper but that takes longer, just build a tool in excel and use an access database on the file server cause its something you can just immediately do. Yeah its not "right" by IT standards and causes headaches for IT but sometimes it's whatever gets the job done next week is what's going to be in the businesses best interest.
Also a lot of these tools are used how they were designed to be used. If a couple people have a function they need fulfilled and some excel tool with macros can provide that in less than a month and save those people a ton of time then I don't see a problem with it. Just make sure SLA is very clear make it clear they can't blame IT if there's problems, offer the best advice for risk management.
At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she "accidentally" sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone's wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
Don't know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
Everyone was pissed lol
Everyone was pissed
as someone who had worked in transparent jurisdictions: everyone should absolutely be pissed about not having this info available publicly always in real time.
One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that "well it's too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal."
👏👏👏
It was the way the information was presented, plus it made everyone realize that there was a pretty huge gap in several people's salaries, even those in the same job (ie, one engineer made 50k while another made 70k, doing the same job). I agree though, employees should not be punished for discussing pay.
It shouldn't matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don't realize their value.
In fact, it's illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone's wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
I wouldn't call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees' tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn't prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
What a hot mess. Were you one of the people that was able to get a salary adjustment in the positives at least?
No :')
Damn, I'm sorry friend. :( I know that sting
Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc... And it got "got" by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly...
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe.
Ransomware blocks the company's access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn't stolen, it's just unusable
Probably, but the message said if the company didn't pay the data would be "auctioned off on the dark web."...
I dunno the liklihood of that actually happening but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible... After all, they have the key to decrypt it and no reason to assume they didn't also have the files... Something was hitting cpu and network usage to 100% for several days across several locations... It was a bad time. It's probably more likely a feint to just install crypto bs on servers while IT is distracted, but still I have no reason to believe it wasn't possible.
Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.
I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
She didn't remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
Good, thats what sick time is for...
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can't be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren't in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can't just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
Sounds like you have too much work for the amount of people if one person leaving cripples you all so hard.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it's still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don't care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn't an argument on the merits of having sick time available it's just a dick move to use it when you don't need it when there's more than enough time to use when it's actually needed.
HR says salary info is confidential.
HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)
On one of my last jobs they required us to do a straightforward but time consuming task with excel, it was ideal to automate it in software but my manager won't ask the dev team because he said it would be very expensive and they were focused on more important things.
I did it with macros on excel and word and kept it to me and my coworker, so we had like two hours of free time everyday, only had to look like we were busy with the sheet.
It's unfortunate when they are short sighted like this. They would rather have 8 people do the work over a week that 1 could do in a day with the right fix.
However often there is rarely the resources or the people with the vision in the right role to push for these solutions.
Didn't the UK's covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel
It was running fine until ppl really started getting sick!
How rude of them!
When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school's merch shop in excel and vbs. It was the single worst thing I have ever made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
It was 50-50 relief vs panic
And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
I love Excel! The best part of my job is where I get to use Excel. The worst parts are where I have to use power point or interact with other people. Sadly, most of time is spent on PPT and interacting these days. :(
Nah, the worst part is when I have to watch someone else use Excel.
YOU DON'T NEED TO RIGHT CLICK AND SELECT COPY. YOU CAN JUST PRESS CTRL+C.
And virtually none of them know how to paste values, so all the templates end up messed up.
True, watching other people use Excel is painful. I used to have a coworker that was so good at Excel that she didn't use a mouse at all and was way quicker than anyone else. She made me feel guilty whenever I was the one being watched because I knew she must be frustrated watching me do things with shortcuts and the mouse.
as long as you don't think the function bar is a search bar. coworker opened my excel spreadsheet and I guess thought it functioned like Google?
I was right behind her to train so no formulas were injured.
Not Excel, just general computer usage- my daughter refuses to Control-C and Control-V and right clicks instead and it drives me nuts.
Like my wife who uses Caps Lock to create capital letters. I've told her to use shift but she's too far gone.
This could be a typewriter holdover. I have vague recollections of some shitty '70's typewriters having only a caps lock (or rather shift lock) toggle to save on two keys. I might have hallucinated that, though. It's been a while.
Or she is just being obtuse. I don't know how old you two are.
We're in our 40's, so not old enough for typewriters. I do remember my dad had one at his workplace though!
It's all fun and games until they find a text box control that doesn't have the right click menu enabled. Then they're baffled.
I am about to scream at the number of people who use Google Slides as a method to document policy.
I am guilty of this. I have a set of fucking ghastly macros that do monthly number crunching for me. Currently moving it all into SQLite and R.
Basically what I'm doing right now with someone else's tools. Coming from IT I'm actually surprised how solid these tools are from a pure availability point of view, and how the company gets value out of something with basically the smallest amount of infrastructure required to support it. I'm producing a bunch of scheduled and ad-hoc reports as a data analyst and improving the tools used in the process, "automating" is the buzzword used although that has a very different definition to me from a sysadmin background.
"Here's the sign up sheet for the Holiday meal!"
.xls
And you only get a work phone to edit that file.
I saw a presentation in excel once, I want sum it up here, but it was pointless.
My job where we run a bunch of programs that are actually VB style interfaces with an excel backend loading data from a huge database... Opening the two that we need for everyday tasks uses 10gigs of ram....
Guys, what is excel? Do you mean libre office calc?
I think its some gui version of numpy arrays...
That but in good
Hey! I have you know the corporation I work for has an enterprise database system from 2002 with two whole maintainers.
Is it worse than intersystems ...?
Excel is a database, application/program with Microsoft forms, notepad, calculation tool, calculation report, sometimes used to make rudimentary sketches when PowerPoint is not convenient.
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they did care and tried to improve it, they'd ruin it.
Fair point
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it!
Excel is one of the few apps MS actually cares about and improves. It's the reason you can't replace it with Google Sheets. I've tried. You can't even print mailing labels from Google sheets/docs without renting a plugin that charges a monthly fee. Printing mailing labels has been in Excel for 30 years.
Every behind the scenes (functions/features) change to Excel has been brilliant. Unfortunately every UI change to Excel has been awful.
I still can't get over the fact that it was only a few weeks ago when I learned that Walter White is the same actor who played dad in Malcolm in the Middle. still blows my mind. What a prolific actor to take on such vastly different roles.
I zoom in on Walter White and try so hard to see Hal Wilkerson in there but I just can't.
You know.... If that is true, it's possible you may suffer from face blindness
My wife grew up with it her whole life and didn't realize it was abnormal until she was about 30. Apparently it's more common than you'd think, and if washer most people have no idea it even exists, even if they have it.
There is a skit from Sat Night Live with Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul that is a spoof of their real lives as celebrities. Up to a point he is mild mannered, and then suddenly he gets very dark and serious. He is really good at portraying an aloof person and turning it on a dime. Point is in the that skit you certainly can see both.
"You know, the company is getting a bit too big and heavy to keep all our books in Excel." What is there to go to beyond that? Lease an IBM AS/400, hire a team of COBOL programmers and have them build a bespoke system for you? Something Something SQL?
Back when I was going to school, every single one of us got one semester in middle school and one semester in high school on MS Office. That was 20 years ago. There's two, two-and-a-half generations of us who are trained to use Excel as the most computing we can do, like if you need a computer to do math you use the calculator app or Excel. If you need to compute more than Excel can, you hire an IT team and a database administrator and such.
Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don't have experience personally with that program, I've heard it's miles better for that type of work than excel
Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it's definitely better in that regard than Excel.
But of course it also has it's limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I've definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
Government runs on Access.
Knitting pattern design
Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
From the sounds of it, the company's entire accounting system is done in a very old version of Excel. One Excel spreadsheet. Which is a very bad idea for so many reasons. If it's not backed up and gets deleted or corrupted.... everything is gone. Not to mention that there's so many better ways to do your main accounting than Excel. Excel has it's uses, just not....that.
Worked for a company in 1998 that had all the employee data on an excel spreadsheet: everything from emergency contacts to date of last paycheck. All of HR. And "for security" it was stored on a floppy disk. One single disk. Which was put back in the safe every close of business. One day, the disk got corrupted. The "backup" was an end-of-year printout, but any changes since then were gone.
Excellent, yes it was a company that spent multiple millions on SAP and everything went back to multiple versions of these excel spreadsheets the accountants maintained that contained all the costing, time, and labour rates. They also generated code to inject new SKUs into SAP. It seemed pretty fragile to me.
SAP is garbage.
Excel has one purpose, data analytics, but as it is a very powerful tool in that regard, with loads of flexible features, people tend to use it in ways that will work for a surprisingly long time, before completely failing.
A common example is to build a database in Excel, say a product catalog with all features and pricing listen in dynamic fields, then someone writes a custom macro to interface the database with external systems, and as new employees join more code is written to make the database easier to update and edit, then more systems are brought in to interface with the database, more data is added, say materials needed in production to build said products, and time calculations to findout how long the different products will take to make, and what product you can make with what you have in inventory, and more macros and integrations.
And it keeps going, but Excel has a hard limit on how much data a sheet can contain, and with all of the new features and integrations it will just be a matter of time untill a new update from Microsoft breaks critical functionallity.
And as the Excel database is used for more and more stuff, it becommes more and more dangerous to the company, at the end you will have an unmaintainable mess that is kept alive on a Windows XP VM running MS Office 2003, since that is the latest system that can run the database with all integrations
A proper SQL database is far more efficient robust, and customizable, but require more indepth knowledge about programming.
True, but unless still using .xls instead of .xlsx chances of reaching the row limit on a sheet became rather small, even for very large companies. Many issues with the everything in excel hell, but the row limit isn't a main one (anymore).
That is fair, I was perhaps a bit rash when bashing Excel on that point.
It does still happen. Even in new projects. It happened in Britain on their big COVID19.xls sheet
Thst is a classic example of what Excel is not used for.
The problem is that many of these are xls files.
Step 1: load xls
Step 2: Save as csv
Step 3: ???
step 4: profit
Then you only get the raw data, not macros or integrations, some of which might be more important to the company than data from a specific point in time.
So then It's a matter of basic data sanitation and code modernization. They're in a better position than places that are still rocking COBOL code, because every database nerd knows excel wheras only 95% of database nerds know COBOL.
If I had a nickel for every utility I worked with that handles billing of capital projects on a spreadsheet, I'd have 2... Which isn't a lot, but still odd that the backbone of their billing is excel
Tell you something: I would have even more money for any instance where people used Lotus Notes for things it was never designed for. I would bet that this is the one program with the least applications that are actually working along the original design features.
And then people claim that Notes is a shitty program, because it was used in a way it was never ever built for (and the manual telling one that this is not a good idea).
At least they aren't trying to use Powerpoint for computation....
IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won't as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
Whew, glad you didn't say it wasn't a password manager...
My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding...
My current boss who said she was retiring about 5 years ago (but didn't...) used Excel as a password manager but would create her own little "boxes" of merged cells, then when she wanted to clear the contents of a merged cell she'd select the whole area and delete entire rows and columns, but she wouldn't notice, so later then complain that the Gen Z office admin was "deleting important passwords" and when I pointed out that it was the boss doing that she'd either deny it, or repeat her process while paying closer attention then blame "Microsoft doing stupid things with this new Excel, it didn't do this before the cloud" (don't ask me why she thought her excel 2010 was on the cloud, other than the fact she saved this doc in Dropbox)
Said scape goat office admin transferred everything to OneNote when we did get finally get Microsoft 365, so at least the boss would stop accidentally deleting everything when trying to edit one thing.
Then the boss started to get annoyed at me for all my "stupid and impossible passwords", how dare I have passwords like "nf6oO!D4t^q%Tnr3" and "&x#5Fr$s68iETYof". I asked why it's a problem, just copy and paste, my passwords are like that because I generate mine within a password manager and I'm not changing my process, I'm already heavily compromising by putting my passwords in her silly OneNote so she can log into accounts I've set up.
She had all her passwords in this document, but she wasn't even using it to copy paste. She'd look at the document to read the password then type it out manually....
I showed her my password manager so she'd understand how useful it is, turns out our MSP had already set one up for her! But she didn't like it because "it always asks me to check a code on my phone just to see my passwords, it takes too long to faff around with my phone, OneNote is just as secure because it's in the Dropbox and you can't get into the Dropbox without the password."
Lord help me.
Lord help her! How has she even made it this far in life? 😂
Haha, I know right!
Our industry was notoriously late to go digital, even in 2020 I heard of organisations physically mailing out letters to clients because no one had an established individual user email system
Our industry (community centres and non accredited adult education) dominated by grannies, retireees who volunteer, and council workers that burnt out and don't care to change the status quo the grannies have set up.
I think my boss used to be sharper in her prime (or rather, I know she was, because I've seen examples of her work from 20 years ago), but she's in her mid seventies, and the lead poisoning and chemo-brain have taken their toll on her.
My old company had a saved spreadsheet on the O:drive called "Passwords"
Our users have had access to Password Safe, then Keepass, then LastPass, now Keeper. Guess what still pops up in screen shares.
Years ago, I've recommended KeePass to a girl from marketing who kept a long list of passwords on paper on her desk. She forgot the master pass after a week or so. That was the end of my trust in users' ability to maintain a safe environment.
Haven't used keepass but it should ask for master password at least once a day right? Or did she not require any credentials for more than a week?
Keepass will autolock after a minute or so, she used that pass few times a day...
My dad uses it as a password manager
I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.
Spreadsheets don't require a UI to be built. People don't have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.
I'm an IT guy too and I'm the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya....might as well just use spreadsheets.
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
It's more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
I see you're in enterprise.
MS Access is a thing...
And it's terrible.
It wasn't that bad in 2003. Too bad it's still stuck there.
exactly this. 200%
Power Platform with dataverse is essentially this
Technically even Access would make more sense. Isn't that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Granted, SQL is still better but I've worked in government where you're lucky to be using digital sheets at all.
I specifically avoided mentioning Access as I have hear horror stories about it when it goes too far.
All those stories are 100% true. And when someone did end up hosting an Oracle based SQL database, they'd pull from it in Access and it'd take several hours for one query. My R code did the same in about 10 seconds.
It's not good software. Lol
Access has its uses, need a database to catalog your (parents) physical photo albums, or perhaps you want to have a database for recipies at home to make them easier to find, then in those cases Access should be fine if you are willing to maintain it.
Reminding me of corrupted .mdb files means I need more alcohol tonight to pacify the demons in my head
Not sure about the current state of things since I haven't used MS Office in decades, and I believe it's entirely made of web apps now, but Access definitely used to be extra. As in, there always were at least two editions of Office, one that included Access and one that didn't. And the former was significantly more expensive.
I actually know this one. Access is available through the MS Office 2019 bundle officially and they pretend it's not really there with 365, but if you have Office365 you can download the app version to work offline. Access still doesn't show up on the main list in the app, but if you search it's there. There's also a way to search it in apps online in 365 but it just downloads it and only runs in the app.
I recently went back to school and the basic degree requirements necessitated an intro to CIS class. It was just a glorified MS suite class. But I had an interesting time figuring out how to get to Access and no where online makes it clear. That's the main reason I typed this out. Maybe some day someone else will have the same issue and this comment will show up on a search and be able to help them. You're welcome future person!
OF COURSE the actual devil would know such things... LOL
Its not that simple.
Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
But, generally, people know it is a horrible workflow and is prone to failure. But there is no time and resources available to revamp the entire system. Because that likely involves going "offline" for the migration as well as the subsequent retraining. Its no different than the technical debt we all laugh and cry about. We know that server is held together with chewing gum and shoe strings but we don't have time or authorization to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. We are just hoping it doesn't fail at a bad time.
If you're lucky? You can periodically export the excel sheet to a database (sql or access, it doesn't matter). You are still doing things wrong but you at least have a recovery option at that point. But, if you can't, you are more or less fucked and know it.
As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
Shit, I'll mock them. I'm too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I'll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I'm a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
Dudes rock
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Nick Burns
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It's great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn't see this on the "not a..." list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!
I love the idea of xls applications, that's really evil!
Correct, it's for tracking work items.
You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
It's not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I'll reject that shit without reading it and type "lmaoooooooo..." To the review character limit.
My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn't make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.
It depends on the scale. I'll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.
They said inappropriate.
I just thought they were depressed by the things they've seen and needed some inspiration
If you wanted to inspire them, you should have shown them this.
The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me...
What's the use case?
Like for anything financial, Excel files are preferable.
Although I will say this. Companies are lying when they say they want Excel exports. They don't. They want CSV but they don't know the difference.
That's... a normal usecase? Importing exporting excel files?
Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
That makes sense if they're transitioning people who have been doing it the old way for 20 years.
ITT, very salty IT guys... I'd rather folks use Excel then some home made stuff. That's the real nightmare fuel. VB, not .net, just VB, from 1995. You'll beg to have bad Excel after you deal with that stuff. 😵😱😭
The scripting in Excel is VBA, which is VB6. So, basically what I'm saying is that you can have both!
In .xls .. no thanks
My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
To me its amazing they've been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a "proper" system. Kind of assuming it wasn't a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
Migration is expensive and time consuming so wouldn't be surprised if laziness played a major role in that even if its obviously a problem
That's true and I've seen this thing a lot to the point people were buying assorted spare parts for a refrigerator sized server circa 1998 almost 20 years later while the entire business was complaining about how slow it was for a majority of those years. Our data center dates back to the 80s so there's some great artifacts still lurking around.
Oh it absolutely did not work properly. We lost a $300M lawsuit because the system would bill clients wrong.
rofl that's kind of amazing then. I'm used to legacy stuff that nobody wants to touch because it's functioning how it's supposed to.
My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn't even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
The software my company makes still uses VB5 for the front end 🙃
🍻🫗
Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps to deliver rapid feature turnaround to customers, generating a million dollars in revenue:
Our finance department, tracking that revenue in a 700MB excel spreadsheet which is version controlled by a 13 year old email thread:
How in the world does that spreadsheet even open?
wtf are ipynb apps?
It's when you have Python and breakfast.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it
Edit - it seems y'all should save up for a sense of humor anyway
Y'all python devs have been getting cocky lately lol
Python: this is a weapon of terror. It is meant to intimidate the enemy.
C++: This is a weapon of war. It is meant to kill the enemy.
Ok but this is a shitpost community
Root beer.
what do you mean, Excel isn't a Database?
It is according to UK's National Health Service: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
I love this part: "To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap."
There is an ODBC driver for Excel. Not to put data into Excel -- To get it back out, treating it as if it were a database.
This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
My dad asked if I could look at a spreadsheet he uses at work, maybe fix a couple of things that he has to manually adjust. This meme is frightfully accurate, the earliest parts of this thing are older than some of the junior devs on my team.
I've been on both sides of this as a sysadmin for almost 15 years then as a data analyst. IT has so many requirements and barriers and any end user tool you have free access to will possibly be an easier route than procuring a boutique solution through IT. Yes of course IT will do it proper but that takes longer, just build a tool in excel and use an access database on the file server cause its something you can just immediately do. Yeah its not "right" by IT standards and causes headaches for IT but sometimes it's whatever gets the job done next week is what's going to be in the businesses best interest.
Also a lot of these tools are used how they were designed to be used. If a couple people have a function they need fulfilled and some excel tool with macros can provide that in less than a month and save those people a ton of time then I don't see a problem with it. Just make sure SLA is very clear make it clear they can't blame IT if there's problems, offer the best advice for risk management.
At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she "accidentally" sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone's wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
as someone who had worked in transparent jurisdictions: everyone should absolutely be pissed about not having this info available publicly always in real time.
One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that "well it's too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal."
👏👏👏
It was the way the information was presented, plus it made everyone realize that there was a pretty huge gap in several people's salaries, even those in the same job (ie, one engineer made 50k while another made 70k, doing the same job). I agree though, employees should not be punished for discussing pay.
It shouldn't matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don't realize their value.
In fact, it's illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone's wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
I wouldn't call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees' tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn't prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
What a hot mess. Were you one of the people that was able to get a salary adjustment in the positives at least?
No :')
Damn, I'm sorry friend. :( I know that sting
Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc... And it got "got" by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly...
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe. Ransomware blocks the company's access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn't stolen, it's just unusable
Probably, but the message said if the company didn't pay the data would be "auctioned off on the dark web."...
I dunno the liklihood of that actually happening but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible... After all, they have the key to decrypt it and no reason to assume they didn't also have the files... Something was hitting cpu and network usage to 100% for several days across several locations... It was a bad time. It's probably more likely a feint to just install crypto bs on servers while IT is distracted, but still I have no reason to believe it wasn't possible.
Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.
I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
She didn't remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
Good, thats what sick time is for...
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can't be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren't in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can't just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
Sounds like you have too much work for the amount of people if one person leaving cripples you all so hard.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it's still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don't care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn't an argument on the merits of having sick time available it's just a dick move to use it when you don't need it when there's more than enough time to use when it's actually needed.
HR says salary info is confidential.
HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
HR commited the very same offence
And gets away with it.
My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)
On one of my last jobs they required us to do a straightforward but time consuming task with excel, it was ideal to automate it in software but my manager won't ask the dev team because he said it would be very expensive and they were focused on more important things. I did it with macros on excel and word and kept it to me and my coworker, so we had like two hours of free time everyday, only had to look like we were busy with the sheet.
It's unfortunate when they are short sighted like this. They would rather have 8 people do the work over a week that 1 could do in a day with the right fix.
However often there is rarely the resources or the people with the vision in the right role to push for these solutions.
Didn't the UK's covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel
It was running fine until ppl really started getting sick!
How rude of them!
When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school's merch shop in excel and vbs. It was the single worst thing I have ever made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
It was 50-50 relief vs panic
And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
I love Excel! The best part of my job is where I get to use Excel. The worst parts are where I have to use power point or interact with other people. Sadly, most of time is spent on PPT and interacting these days. :(
Nah, the worst part is when I have to watch someone else use Excel.
YOU DON'T NEED TO RIGHT CLICK AND SELECT COPY. YOU CAN JUST PRESS CTRL+C.
And virtually none of them know how to paste values, so all the templates end up messed up.
True, watching other people use Excel is painful. I used to have a coworker that was so good at Excel that she didn't use a mouse at all and was way quicker than anyone else. She made me feel guilty whenever I was the one being watched because I knew she must be frustrated watching me do things with shortcuts and the mouse.
as long as you don't think the function bar is a search bar. coworker opened my excel spreadsheet and I guess thought it functioned like Google?
I was right behind her to train so no formulas were injured.
Not Excel, just general computer usage- my daughter refuses to Control-C and Control-V and right clicks instead and it drives me nuts.
Like my wife who uses Caps Lock to create capital letters. I've told her to use shift but she's too far gone.
This could be a typewriter holdover. I have vague recollections of some shitty '70's typewriters having only a caps lock (or rather shift lock) toggle to save on two keys. I might have hallucinated that, though. It's been a while.
Or she is just being obtuse. I don't know how old you two are.
We're in our 40's, so not old enough for typewriters. I do remember my dad had one at his workplace though!
It's all fun and games until they find a text box control that doesn't have the right click menu enabled. Then they're baffled.
I am about to scream at the number of people who use Google Slides as a method to document policy.
I am guilty of this. I have a set of fucking ghastly macros that do monthly number crunching for me. Currently moving it all into SQLite and R.
Basically what I'm doing right now with someone else's tools. Coming from IT I'm actually surprised how solid these tools are from a pure availability point of view, and how the company gets value out of something with basically the smallest amount of infrastructure required to support it. I'm producing a bunch of scheduled and ad-hoc reports as a data analyst and improving the tools used in the process, "automating" is the buzzword used although that has a very different definition to me from a sysadmin background.
"Here's the sign up sheet for the Holiday meal!"
.xls
And you only get a work phone to edit that file.
I saw a presentation in excel once, I want sum it up here, but it was pointless.
My job where we run a bunch of programs that are actually VB style interfaces with an excel backend loading data from a huge database... Opening the two that we need for everyday tasks uses 10gigs of ram....
Guys, what is excel? Do you mean libre office calc?
I think its some gui version of numpy arrays...
That but in good
Hey! I have you know the corporation I work for has an enterprise database system from 2002 with two whole maintainers.
Is it worse than intersystems ...?
Excel is a database, application/program with Microsoft forms, notepad, calculation tool, calculation report, sometimes used to make rudimentary sketches when PowerPoint is not convenient.
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they did care and tried to improve it, they'd ruin it.
Fair point
Excel is one of the few apps MS actually cares about and improves. It's the reason you can't replace it with Google Sheets. I've tried. You can't even print mailing labels from Google sheets/docs without renting a plugin that charges a monthly fee. Printing mailing labels has been in Excel for 30 years.
Every behind the scenes (functions/features) change to Excel has been brilliant. Unfortunately every UI change to Excel has been awful.
I still can't get over the fact that it was only a few weeks ago when I learned that Walter White is the same actor who played dad in Malcolm in the Middle. still blows my mind. What a prolific actor to take on such vastly different roles.
I zoom in on Walter White and try so hard to see Hal Wilkerson in there but I just can't.
You know.... If that is true, it's possible you may suffer from face blindness
My wife grew up with it her whole life and didn't realize it was abnormal until she was about 30. Apparently it's more common than you'd think, and if washer most people have no idea it even exists, even if they have it.
There is a skit from Sat Night Live with Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul that is a spoof of their real lives as celebrities. Up to a point he is mild mannered, and then suddenly he gets very dark and serious. He is really good at portraying an aloof person and turning it on a dime. Point is in the that skit you certainly can see both.
Okay let me ask the question:
"You know, the company is getting a bit too big and heavy to keep all our books in Excel." What is there to go to beyond that? Lease an IBM AS/400, hire a team of COBOL programmers and have them build a bespoke system for you? Something Something SQL?
Back when I was going to school, every single one of us got one semester in middle school and one semester in high school on MS Office. That was 20 years ago. There's two, two-and-a-half generations of us who are trained to use Excel as the most computing we can do, like if you need a computer to do math you use the calculator app or Excel. If you need to compute more than Excel can, you hire an IT team and a database administrator and such.
Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don't have experience personally with that program, I've heard it's miles better for that type of work than excel
Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it's definitely better in that regard than Excel.
But of course it also has it's limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I've definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
Government runs on Access.
Knitting pattern design
Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
From the sounds of it, the company's entire accounting system is done in a very old version of Excel. One Excel spreadsheet. Which is a very bad idea for so many reasons. If it's not backed up and gets deleted or corrupted.... everything is gone. Not to mention that there's so many better ways to do your main accounting than Excel. Excel has it's uses, just not....that.
Worked for a company in 1998 that had all the employee data on an excel spreadsheet: everything from emergency contacts to date of last paycheck. All of HR. And "for security" it was stored on a floppy disk. One single disk. Which was put back in the safe every close of business. One day, the disk got corrupted. The "backup" was an end-of-year printout, but any changes since then were gone.
Excellent, yes it was a company that spent multiple millions on SAP and everything went back to multiple versions of these excel spreadsheets the accountants maintained that contained all the costing, time, and labour rates. They also generated code to inject new SKUs into SAP. It seemed pretty fragile to me.
SAP is garbage.
Excel has one purpose, data analytics, but as it is a very powerful tool in that regard, with loads of flexible features, people tend to use it in ways that will work for a surprisingly long time, before completely failing.
A common example is to build a database in Excel, say a product catalog with all features and pricing listen in dynamic fields, then someone writes a custom macro to interface the database with external systems, and as new employees join more code is written to make the database easier to update and edit, then more systems are brought in to interface with the database, more data is added, say materials needed in production to build said products, and time calculations to findout how long the different products will take to make, and what product you can make with what you have in inventory, and more macros and integrations.
And it keeps going, but Excel has a hard limit on how much data a sheet can contain, and with all of the new features and integrations it will just be a matter of time untill a new update from Microsoft breaks critical functionallity.
And as the Excel database is used for more and more stuff, it becommes more and more dangerous to the company, at the end you will have an unmaintainable mess that is kept alive on a Windows XP VM running MS Office 2003, since that is the latest system that can run the database with all integrations
A proper SQL database is far more efficient robust, and customizable, but require more indepth knowledge about programming.
True, but unless still using .xls instead of .xlsx chances of reaching the row limit on a sheet became rather small, even for very large companies. Many issues with the everything in excel hell, but the row limit isn't a main one (anymore).
That is fair, I was perhaps a bit rash when bashing Excel on that point.
It does still happen. Even in new projects. It happened in Britain on their big COVID19.xls sheet
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
Oh yeah, I remember that one...
Thst is a classic example of what Excel is not used for.
The problem is that many of these are xls files.
Step 1: load xls
Step 2: Save as csv
Step 3: ???
step 4: profit
Then you only get the raw data, not macros or integrations, some of which might be more important to the company than data from a specific point in time.
So then It's a matter of basic data sanitation and code modernization. They're in a better position than places that are still rocking COBOL code, because every database nerd knows excel wheras only 95% of database nerds know COBOL.
If I had a nickel for every utility I worked with that handles billing of capital projects on a spreadsheet, I'd have 2... Which isn't a lot, but still odd that the backbone of their billing is excel
Tell you something: I would have even more money for any instance where people used Lotus Notes for things it was never designed for. I would bet that this is the one program with the least applications that are actually working along the original design features.
And then people claim that Notes is a shitty program, because it was used in a way it was never ever built for (and the manual telling one that this is not a good idea).
At least they aren't trying to use Powerpoint for computation....
https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc
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Image Transcription: Meme
Me if I had a dollar for every inappropriate use of Excel I've seen
[An image of a storage room, which contains a giant rectangle made of cash. There are two people standing near it]
hmm what's this about
https://lemmy.zip/comment/5475869
Nothing like designing and modeling a $100M piece of equipment using Excel
I can relate with powerpoint.