• rtxn@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      15000 rows. 120 columns. One sheet. Creation date: 2011. A dedicated computer. Working at a multinational company is bad for mental health.

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        15 days ago

        And then OneDrive comes along, someone accidentally saved “to the cloud” (IE the default windows location of OneDrive). And of course someone (you) has to fix all the desync bullshit.
        Fuck excel, fuck Microsoft, fuck OneDrive!

        Thank god my company is transitioning to a decent no code solution (nocobase plus literally anything that can interact with postgres - currently n8n but not yet limited to that. It’s a transition from excel, literally anything is better! (Tho, nocobase is awesome, non has it’s perks)).
        Many parentheses, soz.
        Fuck excel, use a database!

      • affenlehrer@feddit.org
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        15 days ago

        I’ve seen that. Used for customer service history AND planning with 3-digit week numbers (the first digit is the last digit of the year) and a lot of macros. Guess who had to fix the macros in 2020 without changing the idiotic 3-digit week numbers?

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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      15 days ago

      In all honesty, I feel like proper database solutions are just not as accessible to laypeople as they’d need to be. It’s easy to create a table in Excel, enter arbitrary values and share it. It’s also not particularly hard to create a second table and add some simple formula for a lookup. More complicated logic can be learned as you go.

      By comparison, something like, say, Access needs more effort and understanding of data structures. You can eyeball a spreadsheet and just enter values without worrying about types, data integrity or anything. Never mind setting up actual database servers.

      Yes, obviously those “proper” definitions would be more reliable, but particularly when the use cases aren’t entirely clear from the outset and new ones keep getting tacked on to an existing solution, it’s just more convenient in the moment to use a fairly low-effort solution until the whole thing becomes a clusterfuck of “low-effort” solutions.

      It becomes a matter of platform gravity: By now, so many people are used to Excel and so much infrastructure is built around it that even a new, better and more laypeople-friendly data handling tool would have a hard time getting a foot in that door.