Comment on What's the dumbest thing you've shipped?
varsock@programming.dev 1 year ago
Had a client that couldn’t understand a small dataset of data. They needed “something interactive to filter and sort the data for a human to review.” We suggested putting it into an excel spreadsheet, and did it for them. Customer didn’t know how to use excel so we had to create a knock-off excel table GUI that had buttons labeled “filter and sort”.
some people seem to have money they don’t know what to do with smh
Since I despise Excel (mostly for the auto converting feature) I appreciate that alternative.
OTOH I am all but a typical user, and while I occasionally use LibreOffice Calc I prefer basic statistics and charts for SQL-tables and CSV-like data in LINQPad (since it’s the tool I use every day, i.e. to spike out ideas before using a real IDE).
hey I’m right there with you. I didn’t want to type out all the details but the customer didn’t want to use any tools they had to “learn”. All they wanted to do was be able to do is view a file structured similarly to CVS. View, filter, and sort alphabetically. This was like a subtask of a bigger project.
Bottom line is we were like “hey don’t waste your money on this request, there are tons of tools that can do this”
Their response was essentially “we contracted you, you guys figure it out.” LOL okay, pay us for 1 additional month and you can have a program to load your csv and sort it
0x0@programming.dev 1 year ago
The world is ruled based on excel spreadsheets. 'Cos… tables.