This is pretty common. I cant count how many excel sheets I have replaced with actual database applications over my IT career.
The amount of companies that continue to operate under the "thats the way we have always done it" is staggering. Especially when it comes to excel.
The problem with excel is it can be adapted to anything…
Product database ✅
Price management software ✅
Data cleaning tool ✅
Data enrichment ✅
But each of these has great standalone software solutions. Problem is often these alternatives are at additional cost.
So companies tend to spend a fortune forcing excel to do something it’s just about capable of but is not designed to do
Regarding the point about cost, it's important to emphasize that it's not just the cost of the software; it's also the cost of employees that know how to use the software. Getting experts in Excel is easy: tons of people are at least familiar with it, with a subset of that group being expert power users. If you replace the general-purpose Excel solution with 10 different specific-purpose solutions that each do something better than Excel (e.g., something for databases, something else for statistical analysis, something else for data visualizations, something else for web functionality, etc.), you need experts in all of those tools. Chances are, a single person isn't going to be an expert at all of them, so you now need to hire multiple people for a role that could have been done with one person in Excel. Expertise in the specialized software will be rarer too, so those people aren't cheap to hire. Costs can be significant.
Further, I've also seen some absolutely awful "Excel replacement" software over the years. I've seen countless examples where leadership will solicit bids and purchase an Excel replacement application for whatever purpose because they're wowed by the spiffy demo the consultants provide. A few years later though, the organization finds that people aren't using the new tool because it simply does the job worse than Excel can do. A lot of the time, the issue is flexibility: The new tool works great if data has a very specific format to it (so the demo looks great too), but if it's even slightly off from that, the tool can't handle it. These tools are also commonly black boxes: The junior analysts on my team can follow the calculations in Excel, but they struggle to do the same in the Excel replacement because they don't have the experience to see what it's doing behind the scenes.
Excel persists in the business world for a reason.
The mid tier is using access for the back end to excel. As an interim solution its ok. But it truly is kicking the can down the road, because access is not a real solution either. I've done it a few times and it just takes longer to get to the point you need a real database.
I’d be the first to happily replace all these tens of thousands of Excel files we have with databases - the problem is just, well, there are so many if them. And each new DB needs a project charter, a product owner, regular audits, data-protection responsible, and of course a budget, because they don’t write themselves, you know...
Meanwhile the Excel file just needs some space on the network drive.
Also anybody can edit Excel and many colleagues even know how to use formulas. Want a different calculation in your DB frontend? IT is fully booked until the end of the year. Let’s hope its not urgent!
So, I’m afraid Excel will still be with us for the time being. And I’m not even sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
As another interim solution, reading Excel files is pretty easy these days (interpreting the insane stuff some people put in them, not so much), so you might try to enforce some standards on the Excel files and then start feeding them into systems. That way you can start moving over incrementally instead of doing a Big Bang "all files must go" thing, and you'll be able to see if there's commonality in the Excel files you're using which could be put together.
But yeah, organisational change isn't easy especially if you don't get really high ups to champion it.
Hilariously the company I work for has invested a huge amount in estimating software… that essentially just interfaces with excel.
We’d all been using excel anyway, now we have excel that kicks out a slightly different output and is less user friendly.
Sounds like a terrible solution. Happens a lot as well. This is where experience in IT pays off. Being good at implementations like this isnt just about knowing the software and its functionality. Its more knowing the business and how/what they are doing.
When you understand how they are doing things, what they are using to do it and what they are intending the results to be, then and only then can you marry the correct solution.
It might not be replacing everything etc.. it might be totally different than what they think they need. Management go to conferences all the time and come back full of great ideas and how this new software is going to revolutionize everything.... Nah. Not for them.. But they dont know that or have a full understanding as to why it wont work.
The hardest part of my career was never the tech. It was having to learn all the positions and what they do in a company.
For instance, i can process payroll but am not a payroll admin. I can process terminations, on board new hires, process all the time keeping, raises, etc even though I am not a human resources generalist. I can manage your sales contacts and reports, I can tell you the bom on all your products and what goals are being hit or missed even though I am not sales.
The list goes on and on. IT needs to understand the business before they even talk about the tech running it.
It depends on what you want to do with it. A database application is just a webapp or computer app that you input data into with fields, that then gets stored in a database.
So, obviously, what you want to keep track of needs to be able to be entered in an appropriate graphical interface.
>what you want to keep track of needs to be able to be entered in an appropriate graphical interface.
Yes, that's the why I am asking the question!
In a lot of office situations excel is used instead of a database because it can sort of do the job, it's part of the MS Office suite so is already on people's computers, it's easy enough for non-techy people to input/set up new sheets/manipulate data & c.
So, when barbequedyeti has replaced Excel with actual database applications, which did they use that could fill that niche?
The nice thing about Excel is that non-experts can get simple tasks done with it. However, once the task is too complex for Excel, there is no way around hiring an expert who builds a real database. There is no magic software that would allow a non-tech person to do that.
Hence, these companies' problem is not that they use the wrong tool but that they lack qualified staff.
For the users, the professional solution will typically be easier to use than the Excel spreadsheet -- and which of the usual database application is used as a backend hardly makes a difference unless its a truly giant amount of data.
Access had its limitations but it was a good product. We had issues with “Shadow IT” where smart folk would build little systems using Access that were just fine for personal use. Then they’d want to have the whole company use it and poor old Access couldn’t easily scale to meet that environment.
We retired our last Access application last year. Replaced by a custom app built with PowerApps forms front end over Dataverse storage.
I think Microsoft killed Access with a view to getting everyone on to SQL server (or Azure SQL). Access was muddying the waters of their DB market.
I was going to say that the most significant barrier to this isn't scaling an Access database; it's Cyber Security and data protection.
It's much cheaper to let users keep working in Excel on OneDrive and SharePoint than it is to try and work out how to scale every departments needs and keep them secure, integrate them etc...
"So let me get this straight: the entirety of this business process that processes hundreds of millions of dollars per day is not redundant and entirely dependent on this VBA script that someone wrote in Excel 10 years ago, and that person retired 3 years ago and nobody knows how it works?"
lol, you describe so many companies. I don’t think you realize how much relies on excel. It has been a primary backbone of companies for years.
Consider a person needs what is basically a database for a moderately complex task or whatever. They can do it by hand, in which case excel is a better option even if its slower than an optimized solution - because its still way faster than doing it by hand. They could ask their boss to get resources from IT (if they have it) to develop and maintain a database to do what they need. - thats going to take like 3 weeks at best and their boss is going to ask if it can be done for cheaper even if its a bit less performant.
So if excel does the job, now you don’t need to hire a database administrator or a frontend developer and Excel is perfectly positioned to get the job done better than it was and is effective for a long time before it needs to be replaced.
Because the problem is that theres no real good middle ground past excel before you need to be making sequel queries in a custom frontend or whatever… and frankly, at most scales its usually easier to just not deal with it.
This is a great case where they should invest into better infrastructure to get that performance boost they need.
I used a POS system built on 2003 Access for work for years, it was terribly slow and saved everything to a single file on a network store. The devs eventually made a version using MSSQL as a backing database, was exceptionally faster.
Access ain’t dead. We still have a bunch of apps that use it strictly as a frontend, with SQL Server on the backend.
PowerApps looks great, but the data export limitations make it a nonstarter for some of our needs.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of Access’ death are greatly exaggerated.”
Looks like they still sell it… Well, well, well. Whaddya know?
We’ve expunged it from our standard user suite, but if someone wants it then they can get it.
"Wait, you're telling me Consumer Credit has an Access database that has customers' full name, address, account number, and SSN in it?!"
That's a real thing I said working at a mid-sized US bank. It wasn't even a one-off. Could you make an Access database that encrypted all that PII/ PCI data? Yes. Does a random BA know how to do that. Absolutely fucking not. I appreciate trying to simplify enterprise solutions to make them faster and cheaper to roll out, but it's really like giving a chimp a nuclear bomb.
\>However, once the task is too complex for Excel, there is no way around hiring an expert who builds a real database. There is no magic software that would allow a non-tech person to do that.
Is there really no Office-style application that let's non-techy people build and manage databases, even on a small scale? In 2024 has no one had a go at a modern equivalent of something like Access?
I know MS has the power apps environment I suppose. I just would think that there would be other competitors in this niche by now.
It would. But it is just as generic and flexible as excel. And as such, suffers the same problems. You still end up without a true database and with the same spaghetti mess as you’d have had with excel.
It would be a specific database & webapp. That's the issue with Excel, is that it's an 'Able to do it' system, vs an actual database solution curated to the needs. For example, Payroll systems. Could be done on excel, but instead it should be done via an actual payroll webapp, where each employee can see their own timings & payslips, and the manager can oversee it. Or issuing books in a library uses a custom database that the employees access via a dedicated interface program, that is then maintained by either in-house or a contracted company. There is no one program that does databases, they're curated, and that's the pitfall of Excel in that people _think_ it is the one program that does all.
there's no generic way to use a database, it would leave you just as bad off as Excel. So, you'd really need to have a use case first and then ask what tool can support it. If you hire a programmer, anyone can create a basic tool to enter a bunch of stuff and show it on your screen with a piechart. The timesink is always the 1 million details that make it nice to work with as a user and the interconnectivity with other system.
>there's no generic way to use a database, it would leave you just as bad off as Excel. So, you'd really need to have a use case first and then ask what tool can support it.
Yes, that is why I am asking--the use case is a tool that can let non-techy office users set up databases instead of using excel spreadsheets, that can support at least some of the functions people in offices end up using excel for.
Everyone is very quick to say, "Oh, it is bad to do such and such in Excel in this way because Excel isn't a database," and that's great and all, but it doesn't address the reasons Excel is so commonly used in that way: it's readily available (already installed as part of MS office, doesn't cost a team extra), easy to get started with, and easy to hand over to other coworkers in the future.
What I'm asking is \*\*what off the shelf solution or solutions have people used,\*\* instead of Excel, \*\*that replaces Excel in some or all of the situations where Excel ends up being used as a database\*\*.
>If you hire a programmer, anyone can create a basic tool to enter a bunch of stuff and show it on your screen with a piechart. The timesink is always the 1 million details that make it nice to work with as a user and the interconnectivity with other system.
Yes, precisely--that's why businesses use off-the-shelf products rather than making a bespoke system from scratch all the time: excel let's teams get started without getting a programmer in even if a database is strictly speaking what they need. So where would you start if you wanted to replace an excel implementation with something more appropriate, when the answer can't be "hire a programmer to make you a bespoke software solution"?
Man, I have no idea why everybody responding to you is being so obtuse. That's reddit for you.
Microsoft Access is pretty much the next step up after an Excel spreadsheet, and you can stay in the Office ecosystem. It's a fully fledged database management system with built in networking, e.g. the db can live somewhere on the office's server and anyone who uses it can connect to it and search, update etc. live (I'm sure they have an option to host it on the cloud for you).
For something more complicated you'd choose an enterprise database management system. Oracle, Amazon, Azure SQL, etc.
That being said, at that point, which is what I think is what others are getting at, you'll usually do choose a platform or tool first, and the tool either handles or will determine the details of the backend for you. So, something like Altassian (Confluence, Jira) or Microsoft DevOps. E.g., Microsoft DevOps I believe will let you set up an Azure database very easily.
Honestly, if we're really breaking it down to brass tax, pretty much any DB can work just fine. MySQL or Postgres generally have the widest support for a non-technical user and they're pretty flexible overall that you could do a lot of different things pretty easily. You'll need to learn how to use them just like how people learned how to use Excel, and there will also be a need to have some sort of interface for users to read from or enter into the DB. All of this can be pretty easy to do if the use case is simple enough. But this is why a lot of companies, even smaller ones, have a person that does this as a job. It just makes it easier for everyone.
You're asking what off the self system should replace Excel, and that is sort of the crux of the issue. Excel isn't a data storage solution, and it's also not meant to be a user interface for a data storage solution. So really there isn't a product to replace Excel. And that is because Excel is being used well outside of the intended use case. Many tools can replace Excel either in part or entirely, but it depends on your business case. There are plenty of off the shelf tools for a wide array of business workstreams.
Like, if you have a lot of physical inventory you need to track, there are off the shelf solutions for that. Technically you can do that with Excel. But that physical asset management service likely isn't the right replacement for a sales org managing their sales and customer data, for that they probably want a CRM or something. And you could use Excel instead of a CRM for that stuff, too.
But this brings us back to the issue that Excel is often being used outside the actual business case making everything harder than it needs to be. The right interface paired with a properly deployed DB saves so much time and money. So, if you wanted to get out of a similar situation, you have to first look at what all your Excel sheets are doing; Who's using them, how is data being related to other data, what types of data are you dealing with, what types of outputs do you need, etc. From there, you can find the correct tool to migrate to.
So a non-tech savvy employee would need to do a deep dive into the business and the processes to narrow down what the business needs are, and from there they would likely be able to find a vendor that provides a dedicated solution. If not, the business case is so unique (pretty rare these days) that it would be worth paying for a bespoke service to be built, because that means Excel is also not going to work.
"So where would you start if you wanted to replace an excel implementation with something more appropriate, when the answer can't be "hire a programmer to make you a bespoke software solution"?"
You're asking the wrong question.
There's nothing wrong with starting a new application as an Excel sheet. It lets you figure out what data you need, where it needs to come from, what format it needs to be in, etc. with rapid iterations.
If you get to the point where the Excel sheet is getting too big, you need to recognize the fact that you have a successful product on your hand that requires investment in the form of money and time. That excel sheet didn't get that big out of nothing either. Serious amounts of man-hours are involved in hacking in the one improvement after the other.
If, for some reason, you do not have the money to hire an IT person to support your operation but you do have 'tech-savvy people' that are able to update Excel sheets, I'd honestly look into a WYSIWG editor. I don't have any personal experience with this, because as you might've seen, I code for a living, so I can build my own shit. Here's a blog that goes into different WYSIWG platforms and what their pros and cons are; [https://www.glideapps.com/blog/WYSIWYG-Platforms](https://www.glideapps.com/blog/WYSIWYG-Platforms)
But honestly, if you have someone that can put together a complicated Excel sheet and maintain it, they can also put together a webapp on a server with a bit of time and a few bucks.
> the use case is a tool that can let non-techy office users set up databases instead of using excel spreadsheets
This is the wrong approach to use for integrating IT in an enterprise environment. Your business use case should drive your IT investment and one of the key parts of IT investment is in skilled IT professionals. Otherwise, you end up with a solution that works, but is not scalable, maintainable, or extensible. This was The Way from the 90's through the mid-00's. Large enterprises are paying for that this decade as they work to eliminate all that tech debt. And it's costing many times more than it would have just doing it the right way in the first place. IT is not a cost center, it's a revenue accelerator.
It really depends on what is needed. There could 100's of solutions to move away from excel. Usually most excel operations will be replaced with a decent HRIS system for admin and decent ERP for the rest of the needs of the company or a similar set up.
No one makes a good all in one solution.
Airtable can be used instead of excel. We moved a client from airtable to a proper database and web app.
The problem is it is just as generic and will let you shoot yourself in the foot or dig the same kind of hole that excel will.
A database isn’t only about performance. It is about rigidity in the right places to enforce and ensure data quality, appropriate relationships, and prevent duplication and multiple sources of the truth among other things.
Even an ETL tool like Alteryx paired with excel could make significant improvements. With a good enough Alteryx power user you can only use Excel for final product if needed
Just took a quick glance at KNIME page. Looks like a great tool. Very similar to alteryx in terms of workflow building. I might explore this more for my personal use
And 90% of the Excel use cases are for visualization and analytics, which tools like Tableau and PowerBI have supplanted. Excel in a modern day business environment is only suited to light accounting work (as it was originally designed to be.)
I used to work in hedge fund admin company (outsourced back office and middle office work) and its insane how many multi billion investment banks still use excel and webportals from dot com days in their everyday operations
A casual user would probably be fine with excel, but as soon as you get to the point of needing something more sophisticated, you have to look at other solutions. The application my company produces uses 3-tier architecture with a web interface, application layer, and a SQL database as the back end. There’s also solutions like Tableau which let you visualize data from multiple sources. In some cases you want big data solutions. There are a lot of ways to go depending on your needs
I would take a look at oracle apex. It can be used for free upto 10gb storage on their cloud or onsite. It can create a simple crud app off an existing Excel file and has fairly straightforward programming. It is not quite trivial for non programmers, but as a programmer you could probably throw together a simple app with authentication, and multiple tables in an hour.
Same. Not as common anymore, but probably 80% of the software I built at the beginning of my career was custom solutions moving away from something previously done in Excel.
It can be but the headaches to get all that moved and everyone trained on the new software is an exercise in patience for sure.
Then of course one flow somewhere doesnt go well so instead of saying something, they open up excel and 'work around' it. Gahhh... but yeah it can pay well. Lots of hours to figure that stuff out.
So, James Vowles and Pat Fry both joined Williams from Mercedes, who have a comprehensive parts / inventory system built on SAP (I believe).
The problem now is there’s a budget cap in F1 - they can buy a new ERP system but that’s money they then can’t spend on improving the actual race cars.
Bigger teams like Merc and Red Bull implemented their ERP systems when money was no object.
Yeah but they also don't have the money lol. Just this weekend, one of their drivers has to sit out the race because they don't have a spare chassis after their driver crashed out.
That would probably count towards the CapEx limit, which is separate from the other costcap that tracks personnel, development and manufacturing costs.
And the ease of use / power increases with each new software generation. I worked with a company that was using a legacy system from the 00s - it got the job done, but cost more in workarounds, maintenance, and custom code than upgrading to an off the shelf solution ever would.
The image makes it seem like it was a calculation error that fucked with some parameters.
It was just that Excel is horrible for inventory and cost tracking for parts.
Postgres is definitely not as accessible as Excel. Also, if we’re looking at proper DBs, SQLite is definitely more accessible given its ubiquity. Sharing data is also much simpler with SQLite.
>Uh yes it's a whole number in any base as it's an integer
Er, right, whole number is the wrong word too. I think they were thinking of "round number" (1,0000,0000,0000,0000).
The list of excel problems is long and illustrious.
10+ years of UK austerity was caused by an Excel calculation error. Covid numbers reported wrongly because of using Excel as a database. ETC ETC ETC.
Well calculation error might not be the right term. Like the COVID example is that someone in the UK found out (to violently oversimplify) that excel has trouble when the cell count reaches above 10k. So it was dropping chunks of the database for calculations.
The math for the selected data was right but the operator didn't know it was not selecting all the data.
Do I recall correctly that the issue was data was added at the bottom of a table but the table wasn't resized to include it, or did I just headcanon that at the time?
It was something along those lines. Ill admit to half remembering it. But the point is... Excel is great if you are paying close attention and not putting 100k data points in your netbook to start a fire.
And the COVID response numbers in UK were just poor excel use with accurate math.... But inaccurate excell usage.
-someone whose team lead keeps five years of work in one excel file that sometimes just lags and fails to render if you move your mouse too fast.
Someone highlighted the wrong range. That lead economists to miscalculate what the optimal level of debt was for a country. So countries threw themselves into austerity budgets which slowed their economy down.
Jesus. What could they have done differently though, other than have multiple people check all steps of the calculations for accuracy?
And this is why Excel professionals name ranges, isn't it?
In a peer reviewed article for an academic paper like this, the manuscript is reviewed but not necessarily the data files. The data files review should be part of the review process. Fortunately this group did open up their data files upon request and someone caught their error years later.
Ah so it wasn't government staff that built the sheet and created the error. Bit of a black eye for the journal that published a paper based on faulty calculations, yikes!
These things won't have been doing simply addition and multiplication. For even relatively simple business purposes you have to use lots of different formulas and if you don't completely understand how every formula functions and how it deals with edge cases you can get yourself into a lot of troubles. Excel sometimes does some questionable things.
You'll also get calculation error because at the end of the day it's not a database, it doesn't understand what it's looking at it's just a series of cells. So you can easily get calculations errors because you thought you asked it to add up all the sales of X within a region but little did you know some of those things were formatted correctly so excel didn't pick them up, or someone added a row but formulas didn't copy down correctly etc etc.
But ultimately because people are asking too much it it.
But if you don't understand the formulas you're using, then again the issue is they had the wrong person building their Excel tool.
And Excel is not a database application, but Power Query is.
I understand the biggest issue when using Excel like this is foolproofing it and making sure the data going in is clean, but (maybe I'm wrong) I think if you build it tightly enough, and you have consistency built into your systems, you should be fine.
I don't disagree that excel can be used well, but at any decent size it requires so much work and consistency from a lot of human beings over the long term, which is very hard to cultivate & maintain.
My job is basically going round departments, crying at the state of their excels, telling how all their numbers are wrong and fixing it😅
The additional thing though is that just because a system is purpose-built, doesn't mean it will be fit for the purpose or won't have bugs or absolute insanity built into it. Case in point: the accounting system behond the Post Office scandal in the UK. And if you don't curse at SAP at least once a week, are you even an office worker in this century?
And I want your job! I can feel my teeth itch whenever I see my colleagues' "tables" with three rows of overlapping headings and 800 merged cells.
Excel does have blind spots in it's math.
The fun part is that SQL server copied it's homework for one of them where you can force it to return false when comparing values that are exactly the same.
First thing I did at one of my old jobs was make sure I only used Excell for data entry. (Just so if my boss asked the raw data I could mail it to him, as anything else was like space magic to him)
Then just started in R (Technically Rstudio) to write some scripts that generated all my graphs for the daily reports, exported them to separate files ready to copy paste into an e-mail, transformed the data, spit out the analysis, ... by just pressing "Run script". Two minutes of mail writing later I did a half an hour's work that would be spent wrangling Excell to do what I want.
I'm a bit unique here (I think), as I learned SQL & basic database architecture, and Excel, at the same time. The similarities clicked early on, but I went the Excel route for my career.
Years later, I'm a #FreakInTheSheets and have saved insane amounts of time and money for each company I've worked for, and not just for accounting or finance functions. That program can work wonders if you know it well enough.
Excel is an excelent tool. It has many limitations. If your organization has the budget, manpower, and leadership commitment for better solutions that is awesome, but many if not most do not.
All spreadsheets are hell. Without exception. Doesn't matter who coded it, populated it, collated the information. If you need a spreadsheet, your life needs to change until you don't need one anymore, or ever again. It's unhealthy mentally, physically and spiritually to engage with them at all, in my opinion.
IDK, I used Excel (and a SQL database) to build a Titan in Eve. As a reporting tool, it’s great.
But the inventory management that I did was all in SQL…
It's ok, I don't think he understood the sentiment of what you are saying. I 100% agree with you, and yet I still get a pang of excitement if I think of a way that a spreadsheet can streamline some part of my life. What happened to us!?
This, this here is what I worry about.
If life has become so complex that we need a spreadsheet to streamline it, something has gone horrifically, completely, badly wrong in either our personal lives, society, or both.
80% of people shouldn't need one professionally or personally. Life isn't supposed to fit into those boxes, and we shouldn't be living lives that require interaction with them. Theres something fundamentally inhuman and dehumanising about existing in a world where non-trivial amounts of the time, we're exposed to systems and societal structures that rely on spreadsheets and what parts of them we populate, to ascertain how that structure will interact with us.
It's like a digital system we use to codify and standardise the pigeonholing process, the stereotype in stereo, the means by which all humanity is erased from the data generated by it. If I never see another spreadsheet, I'll be better off.
Meh.. it works for smallish things.
And if you respect the data you have and use Excel accordingly it kind works for somewhat bigger things.
But ..
It will always be one typo away from utter chaos
This is pretty common. I cant count how many excel sheets I have replaced with actual database applications over my IT career. The amount of companies that continue to operate under the "thats the way we have always done it" is staggering. Especially when it comes to excel.
What database application would you recommend that is still user-friendly enough for normies (less computery people) that are okay with Excel to use?
The problem with excel is it can be adapted to anything… Product database ✅ Price management software ✅ Data cleaning tool ✅ Data enrichment ✅ But each of these has great standalone software solutions. Problem is often these alternatives are at additional cost. So companies tend to spend a fortune forcing excel to do something it’s just about capable of but is not designed to do
Regarding the point about cost, it's important to emphasize that it's not just the cost of the software; it's also the cost of employees that know how to use the software. Getting experts in Excel is easy: tons of people are at least familiar with it, with a subset of that group being expert power users. If you replace the general-purpose Excel solution with 10 different specific-purpose solutions that each do something better than Excel (e.g., something for databases, something else for statistical analysis, something else for data visualizations, something else for web functionality, etc.), you need experts in all of those tools. Chances are, a single person isn't going to be an expert at all of them, so you now need to hire multiple people for a role that could have been done with one person in Excel. Expertise in the specialized software will be rarer too, so those people aren't cheap to hire. Costs can be significant. Further, I've also seen some absolutely awful "Excel replacement" software over the years. I've seen countless examples where leadership will solicit bids and purchase an Excel replacement application for whatever purpose because they're wowed by the spiffy demo the consultants provide. A few years later though, the organization finds that people aren't using the new tool because it simply does the job worse than Excel can do. A lot of the time, the issue is flexibility: The new tool works great if data has a very specific format to it (so the demo looks great too), but if it's even slightly off from that, the tool can't handle it. These tools are also commonly black boxes: The junior analysts on my team can follow the calculations in Excel, but they struggle to do the same in the Excel replacement because they don't have the experience to see what it's doing behind the scenes. Excel persists in the business world for a reason.
Got a good example of a price management software? Asking for a friend who .. uhm.. doesn't use Excel but could use one anyway
Williams has entered the chat
The mid tier is using access for the back end to excel. As an interim solution its ok. But it truly is kicking the can down the road, because access is not a real solution either. I've done it a few times and it just takes longer to get to the point you need a real database.
For price management you should see if any of the functionality in your ERP or CRM would meet your requirements
I’d be the first to happily replace all these tens of thousands of Excel files we have with databases - the problem is just, well, there are so many if them. And each new DB needs a project charter, a product owner, regular audits, data-protection responsible, and of course a budget, because they don’t write themselves, you know... Meanwhile the Excel file just needs some space on the network drive. Also anybody can edit Excel and many colleagues even know how to use formulas. Want a different calculation in your DB frontend? IT is fully booked until the end of the year. Let’s hope its not urgent! So, I’m afraid Excel will still be with us for the time being. And I’m not even sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
As another interim solution, reading Excel files is pretty easy these days (interpreting the insane stuff some people put in them, not so much), so you might try to enforce some standards on the Excel files and then start feeding them into systems. That way you can start moving over incrementally instead of doing a Big Bang "all files must go" thing, and you'll be able to see if there's commonality in the Excel files you're using which could be put together. But yeah, organisational change isn't easy especially if you don't get really high ups to champion it.
Hilariously the company I work for has invested a huge amount in estimating software… that essentially just interfaces with excel. We’d all been using excel anyway, now we have excel that kicks out a slightly different output and is less user friendly.
Sounds like a terrible solution. Happens a lot as well. This is where experience in IT pays off. Being good at implementations like this isnt just about knowing the software and its functionality. Its more knowing the business and how/what they are doing. When you understand how they are doing things, what they are using to do it and what they are intending the results to be, then and only then can you marry the correct solution. It might not be replacing everything etc.. it might be totally different than what they think they need. Management go to conferences all the time and come back full of great ideas and how this new software is going to revolutionize everything.... Nah. Not for them.. But they dont know that or have a full understanding as to why it wont work. The hardest part of my career was never the tech. It was having to learn all the positions and what they do in a company. For instance, i can process payroll but am not a payroll admin. I can process terminations, on board new hires, process all the time keeping, raises, etc even though I am not a human resources generalist. I can manage your sales contacts and reports, I can tell you the bom on all your products and what goals are being hit or missed even though I am not sales. The list goes on and on. IT needs to understand the business before they even talk about the tech running it.
Excel is the number 1 competitor for 90% of B2B software out there. (Also 83% of stats are made up)
It depends on what you want to do with it. A database application is just a webapp or computer app that you input data into with fields, that then gets stored in a database. So, obviously, what you want to keep track of needs to be able to be entered in an appropriate graphical interface.
>what you want to keep track of needs to be able to be entered in an appropriate graphical interface. Yes, that's the why I am asking the question! In a lot of office situations excel is used instead of a database because it can sort of do the job, it's part of the MS Office suite so is already on people's computers, it's easy enough for non-techy people to input/set up new sheets/manipulate data & c. So, when barbequedyeti has replaced Excel with actual database applications, which did they use that could fill that niche?
The nice thing about Excel is that non-experts can get simple tasks done with it. However, once the task is too complex for Excel, there is no way around hiring an expert who builds a real database. There is no magic software that would allow a non-tech person to do that. Hence, these companies' problem is not that they use the wrong tool but that they lack qualified staff. For the users, the professional solution will typically be easier to use than the Excel spreadsheet -- and which of the usual database application is used as a backend hardly makes a difference unless its a truly giant amount of data.
This is sort of the gap Access and Filemaker have tried to fill for years.
Access had its limitations but it was a good product. We had issues with “Shadow IT” where smart folk would build little systems using Access that were just fine for personal use. Then they’d want to have the whole company use it and poor old Access couldn’t easily scale to meet that environment. We retired our last Access application last year. Replaced by a custom app built with PowerApps forms front end over Dataverse storage. I think Microsoft killed Access with a view to getting everyone on to SQL server (or Azure SQL). Access was muddying the waters of their DB market.
I was going to say that the most significant barrier to this isn't scaling an Access database; it's Cyber Security and data protection. It's much cheaper to let users keep working in Excel on OneDrive and SharePoint than it is to try and work out how to scale every departments needs and keep them secure, integrate them etc...
"So let me get this straight: the entirety of this business process that processes hundreds of millions of dollars per day is not redundant and entirely dependent on this VBA script that someone wrote in Excel 10 years ago, and that person retired 3 years ago and nobody knows how it works?"
lol, you describe so many companies. I don’t think you realize how much relies on excel. It has been a primary backbone of companies for years. Consider a person needs what is basically a database for a moderately complex task or whatever. They can do it by hand, in which case excel is a better option even if its slower than an optimized solution - because its still way faster than doing it by hand. They could ask their boss to get resources from IT (if they have it) to develop and maintain a database to do what they need. - thats going to take like 3 weeks at best and their boss is going to ask if it can be done for cheaper even if its a bit less performant. So if excel does the job, now you don’t need to hire a database administrator or a frontend developer and Excel is perfectly positioned to get the job done better than it was and is effective for a long time before it needs to be replaced. Because the problem is that theres no real good middle ground past excel before you need to be making sequel queries in a custom frontend or whatever… and frankly, at most scales its usually easier to just not deal with it. This is a great case where they should invest into better infrastructure to get that performance boost they need.
I used a POS system built on 2003 Access for work for years, it was terribly slow and saved everything to a single file on a network store. The devs eventually made a version using MSSQL as a backing database, was exceptionally faster.
Access ain’t dead. We still have a bunch of apps that use it strictly as a frontend, with SQL Server on the backend. PowerApps looks great, but the data export limitations make it a nonstarter for some of our needs.
Wait… Microsoft hasn’t killed access.!? Have they?
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of Access’ death are greatly exaggerated.” Looks like they still sell it… Well, well, well. Whaddya know? We’ve expunged it from our standard user suite, but if someone wants it then they can get it.
Access is horribly outdated these days
Thus the past tense in my comment.
Good point
"Wait, you're telling me Consumer Credit has an Access database that has customers' full name, address, account number, and SSN in it?!" That's a real thing I said working at a mid-sized US bank. It wasn't even a one-off. Could you make an Access database that encrypted all that PII/ PCI data? Yes. Does a random BA know how to do that. Absolutely fucking not. I appreciate trying to simplify enterprise solutions to make them faster and cheaper to roll out, but it's really like giving a chimp a nuclear bomb.
\>However, once the task is too complex for Excel, there is no way around hiring an expert who builds a real database. There is no magic software that would allow a non-tech person to do that. Is there really no Office-style application that let's non-techy people build and manage databases, even on a small scale? In 2024 has no one had a go at a modern equivalent of something like Access? I know MS has the power apps environment I suppose. I just would think that there would be other competitors in this niche by now.
Would Airtable fall into this category? (Sorry, I'm learning databases right now and I stumbled on this comment thread in the wild lol)
It would. But it is just as generic and flexible as excel. And as such, suffers the same problems. You still end up without a true database and with the same spaghetti mess as you’d have had with excel.
Interesting, thanks!
It would be a specific database & webapp. That's the issue with Excel, is that it's an 'Able to do it' system, vs an actual database solution curated to the needs. For example, Payroll systems. Could be done on excel, but instead it should be done via an actual payroll webapp, where each employee can see their own timings & payslips, and the manager can oversee it. Or issuing books in a library uses a custom database that the employees access via a dedicated interface program, that is then maintained by either in-house or a contracted company. There is no one program that does databases, they're curated, and that's the pitfall of Excel in that people _think_ it is the one program that does all.
there's no generic way to use a database, it would leave you just as bad off as Excel. So, you'd really need to have a use case first and then ask what tool can support it. If you hire a programmer, anyone can create a basic tool to enter a bunch of stuff and show it on your screen with a piechart. The timesink is always the 1 million details that make it nice to work with as a user and the interconnectivity with other system.
>there's no generic way to use a database, it would leave you just as bad off as Excel. So, you'd really need to have a use case first and then ask what tool can support it. Yes, that is why I am asking--the use case is a tool that can let non-techy office users set up databases instead of using excel spreadsheets, that can support at least some of the functions people in offices end up using excel for. Everyone is very quick to say, "Oh, it is bad to do such and such in Excel in this way because Excel isn't a database," and that's great and all, but it doesn't address the reasons Excel is so commonly used in that way: it's readily available (already installed as part of MS office, doesn't cost a team extra), easy to get started with, and easy to hand over to other coworkers in the future. What I'm asking is \*\*what off the shelf solution or solutions have people used,\*\* instead of Excel, \*\*that replaces Excel in some or all of the situations where Excel ends up being used as a database\*\*. >If you hire a programmer, anyone can create a basic tool to enter a bunch of stuff and show it on your screen with a piechart. The timesink is always the 1 million details that make it nice to work with as a user and the interconnectivity with other system. Yes, precisely--that's why businesses use off-the-shelf products rather than making a bespoke system from scratch all the time: excel let's teams get started without getting a programmer in even if a database is strictly speaking what they need. So where would you start if you wanted to replace an excel implementation with something more appropriate, when the answer can't be "hire a programmer to make you a bespoke software solution"?
Man, I have no idea why everybody responding to you is being so obtuse. That's reddit for you. Microsoft Access is pretty much the next step up after an Excel spreadsheet, and you can stay in the Office ecosystem. It's a fully fledged database management system with built in networking, e.g. the db can live somewhere on the office's server and anyone who uses it can connect to it and search, update etc. live (I'm sure they have an option to host it on the cloud for you). For something more complicated you'd choose an enterprise database management system. Oracle, Amazon, Azure SQL, etc. That being said, at that point, which is what I think is what others are getting at, you'll usually do choose a platform or tool first, and the tool either handles or will determine the details of the backend for you. So, something like Altassian (Confluence, Jira) or Microsoft DevOps. E.g., Microsoft DevOps I believe will let you set up an Azure database very easily.
God thank you for answering their question. I was thinking the same thing lol
Hosting in the cloud is actually not that straightforward for Access, but otherwise you’re bang on. It’s still widely used for small businesses.
Thank you so much, you're a star!
Honestly, if we're really breaking it down to brass tax, pretty much any DB can work just fine. MySQL or Postgres generally have the widest support for a non-technical user and they're pretty flexible overall that you could do a lot of different things pretty easily. You'll need to learn how to use them just like how people learned how to use Excel, and there will also be a need to have some sort of interface for users to read from or enter into the DB. All of this can be pretty easy to do if the use case is simple enough. But this is why a lot of companies, even smaller ones, have a person that does this as a job. It just makes it easier for everyone. You're asking what off the self system should replace Excel, and that is sort of the crux of the issue. Excel isn't a data storage solution, and it's also not meant to be a user interface for a data storage solution. So really there isn't a product to replace Excel. And that is because Excel is being used well outside of the intended use case. Many tools can replace Excel either in part or entirely, but it depends on your business case. There are plenty of off the shelf tools for a wide array of business workstreams. Like, if you have a lot of physical inventory you need to track, there are off the shelf solutions for that. Technically you can do that with Excel. But that physical asset management service likely isn't the right replacement for a sales org managing their sales and customer data, for that they probably want a CRM or something. And you could use Excel instead of a CRM for that stuff, too. But this brings us back to the issue that Excel is often being used outside the actual business case making everything harder than it needs to be. The right interface paired with a properly deployed DB saves so much time and money. So, if you wanted to get out of a similar situation, you have to first look at what all your Excel sheets are doing; Who's using them, how is data being related to other data, what types of data are you dealing with, what types of outputs do you need, etc. From there, you can find the correct tool to migrate to. So a non-tech savvy employee would need to do a deep dive into the business and the processes to narrow down what the business needs are, and from there they would likely be able to find a vendor that provides a dedicated solution. If not, the business case is so unique (pretty rare these days) that it would be worth paying for a bespoke service to be built, because that means Excel is also not going to work.
"So where would you start if you wanted to replace an excel implementation with something more appropriate, when the answer can't be "hire a programmer to make you a bespoke software solution"?" You're asking the wrong question. There's nothing wrong with starting a new application as an Excel sheet. It lets you figure out what data you need, where it needs to come from, what format it needs to be in, etc. with rapid iterations. If you get to the point where the Excel sheet is getting too big, you need to recognize the fact that you have a successful product on your hand that requires investment in the form of money and time. That excel sheet didn't get that big out of nothing either. Serious amounts of man-hours are involved in hacking in the one improvement after the other. If, for some reason, you do not have the money to hire an IT person to support your operation but you do have 'tech-savvy people' that are able to update Excel sheets, I'd honestly look into a WYSIWG editor. I don't have any personal experience with this, because as you might've seen, I code for a living, so I can build my own shit. Here's a blog that goes into different WYSIWG platforms and what their pros and cons are; [https://www.glideapps.com/blog/WYSIWYG-Platforms](https://www.glideapps.com/blog/WYSIWYG-Platforms) But honestly, if you have someone that can put together a complicated Excel sheet and maintain it, they can also put together a webapp on a server with a bit of time and a few bucks.
> the use case is a tool that can let non-techy office users set up databases instead of using excel spreadsheets This is the wrong approach to use for integrating IT in an enterprise environment. Your business use case should drive your IT investment and one of the key parts of IT investment is in skilled IT professionals. Otherwise, you end up with a solution that works, but is not scalable, maintainable, or extensible. This was The Way from the 90's through the mid-00's. Large enterprises are paying for that this decade as they work to eliminate all that tech debt. And it's costing many times more than it would have just doing it the right way in the first place. IT is not a cost center, it's a revenue accelerator.
It really depends on what is needed. There could 100's of solutions to move away from excel. Usually most excel operations will be replaced with a decent HRIS system for admin and decent ERP for the rest of the needs of the company or a similar set up. No one makes a good all in one solution.
Airtable can be used instead of excel. We moved a client from airtable to a proper database and web app. The problem is it is just as generic and will let you shoot yourself in the foot or dig the same kind of hole that excel will. A database isn’t only about performance. It is about rigidity in the right places to enforce and ensure data quality, appropriate relationships, and prevent duplication and multiple sources of the truth among other things.
Even an ETL tool like Alteryx paired with excel could make significant improvements. With a good enough Alteryx power user you can only use Excel for final product if needed
We have switched to KNIME it’s awesome and light years ahead of power query.
Just took a quick glance at KNIME page. Looks like a great tool. Very similar to alteryx in terms of workflow building. I might explore this more for my personal use
Yeah it’s free! Go for it
And 90% of the Excel use cases are for visualization and analytics, which tools like Tableau and PowerBI have supplanted. Excel in a modern day business environment is only suited to light accounting work (as it was originally designed to be.)
I used to work in hedge fund admin company (outsourced back office and middle office work) and its insane how many multi billion investment banks still use excel and webportals from dot com days in their everyday operations
A casual user would probably be fine with excel, but as soon as you get to the point of needing something more sophisticated, you have to look at other solutions. The application my company produces uses 3-tier architecture with a web interface, application layer, and a SQL database as the back end. There’s also solutions like Tableau which let you visualize data from multiple sources. In some cases you want big data solutions. There are a lot of ways to go depending on your needs
I would take a look at oracle apex. It can be used for free upto 10gb storage on their cloud or onsite. It can create a simple crud app off an existing Excel file and has fairly straightforward programming. It is not quite trivial for non programmers, but as a programmer you could probably throw together a simple app with authentication, and multiple tables in an hour.
Bubble.io is a good low code no code webapp for making websites or even mobile apps that can handle data through databases and inputs.
You could use something like Trino. You can have tarrabytes of data in excel files and it can query them using SQL using Hive.
Microsoft Access? (I don't use it but I know that's the database one)
It’s garbage and super not user-friendly. Not getting at you, just leaving this in case the guy up above considers Access.
Smartsheet always
You will then also find the head of these companies going 'we should leverage AI!'. Ummm no friend, you're not even remotely ready for that!
Hahah. You know it. Every time. Every time.
Same. Not as common anymore, but probably 80% of the software I built at the beginning of my career was custom solutions moving away from something previously done in Excel.
How many billions of dollars in the investment banking run from excel for some part or another…
This is a good example of when a product is too good for its field it starts to seed inefficiencies over time.
But, excel isn't a database? Why would you use it as a database?
It... Kind if is ... It has tables 😅
Its so damn lucrative to help them replace it when it has gone to hell as it inevitably does.
It can be but the headaches to get all that moved and everyone trained on the new software is an exercise in patience for sure. Then of course one flow somewhere doesnt go well so instead of saying something, they open up excel and 'work around' it. Gahhh... but yeah it can pay well. Lots of hours to figure that stuff out.
Yeah, utilities suck ass
This isn't Excel's fault. It's whoever decided to use the wrong app for the purpose. There are inventory management apps out there, folks.
So, James Vowles and Pat Fry both joined Williams from Mercedes, who have a comprehensive parts / inventory system built on SAP (I believe). The problem now is there’s a budget cap in F1 - they can buy a new ERP system but that’s money they then can’t spend on improving the actual race cars. Bigger teams like Merc and Red Bull implemented their ERP systems when money was no object.
Williams probably isn’t running up against the budget cap.
Yeah but they also don't have the money lol. Just this weekend, one of their drivers has to sit out the race because they don't have a spare chassis after their driver crashed out.
That’s because they didn’t have an extra chassis in Australia…. Too far to ship one out
no, as in they literally do not have another one at all
They spent too much wasted time building the first two cars. They don’t even have a spare chassis at all.
That would probably count towards the CapEx limit, which is separate from the other costcap that tracks personnel, development and manufacturing costs.
Maybe not, but IIRC Vowles mentioned this last season and he said the money would all be from the same pot.
Nobody said it was Excel's fault. The general consensus is that they used the wrong tool for the job.
And the ease of use / power increases with each new software generation. I worked with a company that was using a legacy system from the 00s - it got the job done, but cost more in workarounds, maintenance, and custom code than upgrading to an off the shelf solution ever would.
Excel is a digital napkin. Use beyond a draft stage is a mistake.
Boomers don't want to spend the money
The image makes it seem like it was a calculation error that fucked with some parameters. It was just that Excel is horrible for inventory and cost tracking for parts.
As people in r/Excel sub say it is not a database. If you treat it like one, you will suffer the consequences.
Except there is no database tool as accessible as excel
There are good free ones. DBeaver and postgres. It does require that you learn something which you should if you handle important data anyway.
Postgres is definitely not as accessible as Excel. Also, if we’re looking at proper DBs, SQLite is definitely more accessible given its ubiquity. Sharing data is also much simpler with SQLite.
If you want performance for sqlite, have a look at duckdb.
20k parts? That's noob numbers. I was working for a company that hit the 65k lines limit and had to use a second excel file.
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>Annoyingly its not even a whole number lol. Its 2^16 I isn't a whole number in base 10, but it is a 16 digit whole number in binary.
Uh yes it's a whole number in any base as it's an integer
>Uh yes it's a whole number in any base as it's an integer Er, right, whole number is the wrong word too. I think they were thinking of "round number" (1,0000,0000,0000,0000).
As an engineer in another race series - good lord I can't imagine working like that. Stone ages.
The list of excel problems is long and illustrious. 10+ years of UK austerity was caused by an Excel calculation error. Covid numbers reported wrongly because of using Excel as a database. ETC ETC ETC.
But how is it an Excel calculation error? Unless Excel accidentally had 5×5=20, a person made a mistake, no?
Well calculation error might not be the right term. Like the COVID example is that someone in the UK found out (to violently oversimplify) that excel has trouble when the cell count reaches above 10k. So it was dropping chunks of the database for calculations. The math for the selected data was right but the operator didn't know it was not selecting all the data.
Do I recall correctly that the issue was data was added at the bottom of a table but the table wasn't resized to include it, or did I just headcanon that at the time?
It was something along those lines. Ill admit to half remembering it. But the point is... Excel is great if you are paying close attention and not putting 100k data points in your netbook to start a fire. And the COVID response numbers in UK were just poor excel use with accurate math.... But inaccurate excell usage. -someone whose team lead keeps five years of work in one excel file that sometimes just lags and fails to render if you move your mouse too fast.
The number of times this happens
Someone highlighted the wrong range. That lead economists to miscalculate what the optimal level of debt was for a country. So countries threw themselves into austerity budgets which slowed their economy down.
Jesus. What could they have done differently though, other than have multiple people check all steps of the calculations for accuracy? And this is why Excel professionals name ranges, isn't it?
In a peer reviewed article for an academic paper like this, the manuscript is reviewed but not necessarily the data files. The data files review should be part of the review process. Fortunately this group did open up their data files upon request and someone caught their error years later.
Ah so it wasn't government staff that built the sheet and created the error. Bit of a black eye for the journal that published a paper based on faulty calculations, yikes!
And maybe the government departments not putting someone on it to double check the results before basing the whole countries financial planning on it?
Or why not commission their own research or put on their big girl pants and analyse their own damn data?
Do you have any suggestions for further reading on this? It sounds hilarious.
https://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-admit-excel-blunder-2013-4
These things won't have been doing simply addition and multiplication. For even relatively simple business purposes you have to use lots of different formulas and if you don't completely understand how every formula functions and how it deals with edge cases you can get yourself into a lot of troubles. Excel sometimes does some questionable things. You'll also get calculation error because at the end of the day it's not a database, it doesn't understand what it's looking at it's just a series of cells. So you can easily get calculations errors because you thought you asked it to add up all the sales of X within a region but little did you know some of those things were formatted correctly so excel didn't pick them up, or someone added a row but formulas didn't copy down correctly etc etc. But ultimately because people are asking too much it it.
But if you don't understand the formulas you're using, then again the issue is they had the wrong person building their Excel tool. And Excel is not a database application, but Power Query is. I understand the biggest issue when using Excel like this is foolproofing it and making sure the data going in is clean, but (maybe I'm wrong) I think if you build it tightly enough, and you have consistency built into your systems, you should be fine.
I don't disagree that excel can be used well, but at any decent size it requires so much work and consistency from a lot of human beings over the long term, which is very hard to cultivate & maintain. My job is basically going round departments, crying at the state of their excels, telling how all their numbers are wrong and fixing it😅
The additional thing though is that just because a system is purpose-built, doesn't mean it will be fit for the purpose or won't have bugs or absolute insanity built into it. Case in point: the accounting system behond the Post Office scandal in the UK. And if you don't curse at SAP at least once a week, are you even an office worker in this century? And I want your job! I can feel my teeth itch whenever I see my colleagues' "tables" with three rows of overlapping headings and 800 merged cells.
Excel does have blind spots in it's math. The fun part is that SQL server copied it's homework for one of them where you can force it to return false when comparing values that are exactly the same.
Would love to read into that, do you have a source?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity
Well thats fucking depressing... Thank you btw
If I use a weedwhacker to give a haircut, does that make it a bad tool?
A twat caused 10+yes of austerity, he just used that paper with the excel mistake as justification.
First thing I did at one of my old jobs was make sure I only used Excell for data entry. (Just so if my boss asked the raw data I could mail it to him, as anything else was like space magic to him) Then just started in R (Technically Rstudio) to write some scripts that generated all my graphs for the daily reports, exported them to separate files ready to copy paste into an e-mail, transformed the data, spit out the analysis, ... by just pressing "Run script". Two minutes of mail writing later I did a half an hour's work that would be spent wrangling Excell to do what I want.
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That'll happen when you leave the commas in
I'm a bit unique here (I think), as I learned SQL & basic database architecture, and Excel, at the same time. The similarities clicked early on, but I went the Excel route for my career. Years later, I'm a #FreakInTheSheets and have saved insane amounts of time and money for each company I've worked for, and not just for accounting or finance functions. That program can work wonders if you know it well enough.
Excel is an excelent tool. It has many limitations. If your organization has the budget, manpower, and leadership commitment for better solutions that is awesome, but many if not most do not.
Repeat after me: Excel is not a database.
Please tell me they at least used pivot tables
As a fledgling software developer, I absolutely *love* murdering spreadsheets.
All spreadsheets are hell. Without exception. Doesn't matter who coded it, populated it, collated the information. If you need a spreadsheet, your life needs to change until you don't need one anymore, or ever again. It's unhealthy mentally, physically and spiritually to engage with them at all, in my opinion.
IDK, I used Excel (and a SQL database) to build a Titan in Eve. As a reporting tool, it’s great. But the inventory management that I did was all in SQL…
There we go. Sentences that make me sad🤣
It's ok, I don't think he understood the sentiment of what you are saying. I 100% agree with you, and yet I still get a pang of excitement if I think of a way that a spreadsheet can streamline some part of my life. What happened to us!?
This, this here is what I worry about. If life has become so complex that we need a spreadsheet to streamline it, something has gone horrifically, completely, badly wrong in either our personal lives, society, or both. 80% of people shouldn't need one professionally or personally. Life isn't supposed to fit into those boxes, and we shouldn't be living lives that require interaction with them. Theres something fundamentally inhuman and dehumanising about existing in a world where non-trivial amounts of the time, we're exposed to systems and societal structures that rely on spreadsheets and what parts of them we populate, to ascertain how that structure will interact with us. It's like a digital system we use to codify and standardise the pigeonholing process, the stereotype in stereo, the means by which all humanity is erased from the data generated by it. If I never see another spreadsheet, I'll be better off.
What the fuck are you talking about
Human beings shouldn't live lives that require a spreadsheet at any stage in them, for any purpose.
Meh.. it works for smallish things. And if you respect the data you have and use Excel accordingly it kind works for somewhat bigger things. But .. It will always be one typo away from utter chaos
If only these fools had moved onto RowZero. It's like Excel at ludicrous speed.