Comment on it always interesting when multi billion dollar company's costing system is a 63 tab excel 97 spreadsheet at it's core...

stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• bajabound@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Whew, glad you didn’t say it wasn’t a password manager…

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  • thedolanduck@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding…

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    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My current boss who said she was retiring about 5 years ago (but didn’t…) used Excel as a password manager but would create her own little “boxes” of merged cells, then when she wanted to clear the contents of a merged cell she’d select the whole area and delete entire rows and columns, but she wouldn’t notice, so later then complain that the Gen Z office admin was “deleting important passwords” and when I pointed out that it was the boss doing that she’d either deny it, or repeat her process while paying closer attention then blame “Microsoft doing stupid things with this new Excel, it didn’t do this before the cloud” (don’t ask me why she thought her excel 2010 was on the cloud, other than the fact she saved this doc in Dropbox)

      Said scape goat office admin transferred everything to OneNote when we did get finally get Microsoft 365, so at least the boss would stop accidentally deleting everything when trying to edit one thing.

      Then the boss started to get annoyed at me for all my “stupid and impossible passwords”, how dare I have passwords like “nf6oO!D4t^q%Tnr3” and “&x#5Fr$s68iETYof”. I asked why it’s a problem, just copy and paste, my passwords are like that because I generate mine within a password manager and I’m not changing my process, I’m already heavily compromising by putting my passwords in her silly OneNote so she can log into accounts I’ve set up.

      She had all her passwords in this document, but she wasn’t even using it to copy paste. She’d look at the document to read the password then type it out manually…

      I showed her my password manager so she’d understand how useful it is, turns out our MSP had already set one up for her! But she didn’t like it because “it always asks me to check a code on my phone just to see my passwords, it takes too long to faff around with my phone, OneNote is just as secure because it’s in the Dropbox and you can’t get into the Dropbox without the password.”

      Lord help me.

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      • LetKCater2U@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Lord help her! How has she even made it this far in life? 😂

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    • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My old company had a saved spreadsheet on the O:drive called “Passwords”

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    • bajabound@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Our users have had access to Password Safe, then Keepass, then LastPass, now Keeper. Guess what still pops up in screen shares.

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      • YoorWeb@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Years ago, I’ve recommended KeePass to a girl from marketing who kept a long list of passwords on paper on her desk. She forgot the master pass after a week or so. That was the end of my trust in users’ ability to maintain a safe environment.

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    • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My dad uses it as a password manager

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• CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.

  Spreadsheets don’t require a UI to be built. People don’t have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.

  I’m an IT guy too and I’m the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya…might as well just use spreadsheets.

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• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Excel is a game dev and game test kit.

  Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Technically even Access would make more sense. Isn’t that part of the same office package or does that cost more?

  Granted, SQL is still better but I’ve worked in government where you’re lucky to be using digital sheets at all.

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  • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I specifically avoided mentioning Access as I have hear horror stories about it when it goes too far.

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    • taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      All those stories are 100% true. And when someone did end up hosting an Oracle based SQL database, they’d pull from it in Access and it’d take several hours for one query. My R code did the same in about 10 seconds.

      It’s not good software. Lol

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      • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Access has its uses, need a database to catalog your (parents) physical photo albums, or perhaps you want to have a database for recipies at home to make them easier to find, then in those cases Access should be fine if you are willing to maintain it.

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    • not_again@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Reminding me of corrupted .mdb files means I need more alcohol tonight to pacify the demons in my head

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  • MacNCheezus@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Isn’t that part of the same office package or does that cost more?

    Not sure about the current state of things since I haven’t used MS Office in decades, and I believe it’s entirely made of web apps now, but Access definitely used to be extra. As in, there always were at least two editions of Office, one that included Access and one that didn’t. And the former was significantly more expensive.

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    • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I actually know this one. Access is available through the MS Office 2019 bundle officially and they pretend it’s not really there with 365, but if you have Office365 you can download the app version to work offline. Access still doesn’t show up on the main list in the app, but if you search it’s there. There’s also a way to search it in apps online in 365 but it just downloads it and only runs in the app.

      I recently went back to school and the basic degree requirements necessitated an intro to CIS class. It was just a glorified MS suite class. But I had an interesting time figuring out how to get to Access and no where online makes it clear. That’s the main reason I typed this out. Maybe some day someone else will have the same issue and this comment will show up on a search and be able to help them. You’re welcome future person!

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      • MacNCheezus@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        OF COURSE the actual devil would know such things… LOL

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• Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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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  • Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Dudes rock

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its not that simple.

  Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this.

  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.

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• Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It depends on the scale. I’ll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.

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• Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn’t see this on the “not a…” list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!

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  • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I love the idea of xls applications, that’s really evil!

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• BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Correct, it’s for tracking work items.

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• FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.

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