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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Me, being scolded for using ipynb notebooks 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:
wtf are ipynb apps?
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it
- Comment replies should be somewhat relevant to the topic
- Jokes should be funny
- It doesn’t cost money to have a sense of humor
- Jokes should make people laugh
Ok but this is a shitpost community
Root beer.
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.
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.
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 :')
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…
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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 used 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
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.
Knitting pattern design
Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
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
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.
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
At least they aren’t trying to use Powerpoint for computation…
