I’m familiar with a multibillion dollar international corporation that uses an excel spreadsheet to communicate between divisions.
Not email or slack or teams or the telephone. An excel spreadsheet.
The left column is where one division enters a message, and the right column is where the other division responds. For a new message, you start a new row. The file lives on a network drive.
But… why?
Because that's the way they've done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn't like change.
@radix@gregorum I can just FEEL how super useful that was many many years ago. How utterly brilliant everyone felt when they got it working. How depressed they must feel to know it's still going.
Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I've worked with many a project manager who "knew Excel" and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.
Bypassing communication archiving requirements? Years ago, I worked for a company that logged all IM, etc, that occurred in a companies intranet. There were laws that required all communications to be preserved for certain industries.
This sounds like a workaround to avoid chat history
Generally bypassing these auditing requirements is a punishable offense. I worked for a firm that was SEC regulated and you might be shocked at how much effort was expended on ensuring these policies weren’t being circumvented.
"We cracked the case open when we discovered their chats in 'troubleshooting_not_secret_comms.xls'. They tried to cover their tracks through regular deletion, and they would have gotten away with it if not for one neglected PC in a disused office running an unsupervised copy of Norton Backup 1990."
I genuinely don’t know. I was as flabbergasted as you are.
It's like a wiki from the 80s!
I used to see this a lot when a team had to engage with an external vendor temporarily (or not so temporarily), but the only approved software both companies shared was Office before Teams was ubiquitous.
In the worst case, the file wasn't able to be shared live (e.g., SharePoint), so it was just going back and forth in email attachments. That was just as much of a nightmare as you'd guess.
So they were sending emails with a file attachment containing... messages? =_= How about using the emails themselves to, you know... type the message?
wtaf
The only thing I can muster in their defense is that Outlook search is garbage, and filtering in Excel to find relevant messages may have been marginally easier. But that's playing devil's advocate and going out on a limb.
It was probably in response to some manager saying it's not a good idea to keep documented agreements in email, so some genius thought putting those in an Excel and attaching to email was compliant with that idea.
lol, I'll buy the search argument I suppose, but the agreements would still be in the email though right? I dunno what to think 😆
That sounds just awful. At least this one is on a network share.
Delete it.
Oh good god. I mean I just am aware that this is how this company communicates, but I can imagine the fallout if it was deleted.
I’m familiar with a multibillion dollar international corporation that uses an excel spreadsheet to communicate between divisions.
Not email or slack or teams or the telephone. An excel spreadsheet.
The left column is where one division enters a message, and the right column is where the other division responds. For a new message, you start a new row. The file lives on a network drive.
But… why?
Because that's the way they've done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn't like change.
@radix @gregorum I can just FEEL how super useful that was many many years ago. How utterly brilliant everyone felt when they got it working. How depressed they must feel to know it's still going.
Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I've worked with many a project manager who "knew Excel" and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.
Bypassing communication archiving requirements? Years ago, I worked for a company that logged all IM, etc, that occurred in a companies intranet. There were laws that required all communications to be preserved for certain industries.
This sounds like a workaround to avoid chat history
Generally bypassing these auditing requirements is a punishable offense. I worked for a firm that was SEC regulated and you might be shocked at how much effort was expended on ensuring these policies weren’t being circumvented.
"We cracked the case open when we discovered their chats in 'troubleshooting_not_secret_comms.xls'. They tried to cover their tracks through regular deletion, and they would have gotten away with it if not for one neglected PC in a disused office running an unsupervised copy of Norton Backup 1990."
I genuinely don’t know. I was as flabbergasted as you are.
It's like a wiki from the 80s!
I used to see this a lot when a team had to engage with an external vendor temporarily (or not so temporarily), but the only approved software both companies shared was Office before Teams was ubiquitous.
In the worst case, the file wasn't able to be shared live (e.g., SharePoint), so it was just going back and forth in email attachments. That was just as much of a nightmare as you'd guess.
So they were sending emails with a file attachment containing... messages? =_= How about using the emails themselves to, you know... type the message?
wtaf
The only thing I can muster in their defense is that Outlook search is garbage, and filtering in Excel to find relevant messages may have been marginally easier. But that's playing devil's advocate and going out on a limb.
It was probably in response to some manager saying it's not a good idea to keep documented agreements in email, so some genius thought putting those in an Excel and attaching to email was compliant with that idea.
lol, I'll buy the search argument I suppose, but the agreements would still be in the email though right? I dunno what to think 😆
That sounds just awful. At least this one is on a network share.
Delete it.
Oh good god. I mean I just am aware that this is how this company communicates, but I can imagine the fallout if it was deleted.
Since it's not mentioned in the article: the device is a Nokia 9200 series Communicator. Had a perfectly functional SMS app for its era, of course.
Nokia Communicators were absolutely rad. Had a 9110 and it was incredible.
That article is so annoying to read
She should be held accountable! Why! Why, I ask!