Submitted 11 months ago by WashedOver@lemmy.ca to [deleted]
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/003fc16b-8f46-43ba-8f85-e4e9481f8875.webp
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.
Whew, glad you didn’t say it wasn’t a password manager…
My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding…
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.
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
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.
I specifically avoided mentioning Access as I have hear horror stories about it when it goes too far.
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.
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.
Dudes rock
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.
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’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.
You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
They said inappropriate.
I just thought they were depressed by the things they’ve seen and needed some inspiration
ITT, very salty IT guys… I’d rather folks use Excel then some home made stuff. That’s the real nightmare fuel. VB, not .net, just VB, from 1995. You’ll beg to have bad Excel after you deal with that stuff. 😵😱😭
The scripting in Excel is VBA, which is VB6. So, basically what I'm saying is that you can have both!
In .xls … no thanks
My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
To me its amazing they’ve been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a “proper” system. Kind of assuming it wasn’t a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn’t even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
The software my company makes still uses VB5 for the front end 🙃
🍻🫗
The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me…
Sometimes it’s okay to fire a client.
Like… into the sun with an oversized circus cannon?
Some of my clients I’d like to actually set of fire
That’s… a normal usecase? Importing exporting excel files?
Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel.
It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
What’s the use case?
Like for anything financial, Excel files are preferable.
Although I will say this. Companies are lying when they say they want Excel exports. They don’t. They want CSV but they don’t know the difference.
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 email thread:
How in the world does that spreadsheet even open?
wtf are ipynb apps?
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it
It’s when you have Python and breakfast.
I’ve been on both sides of this as a sysadmin for almost 15 years then as a data analyst. IT has so many requirements and barriers and any end user tool you have free access to will possibly be an easier route than procuring a boutique solution through IT. Yes of course IT will do it proper but that takes longer, just build a tool in excel and use an access database on the file server cause its something you can just immediately do. Yeah its not “right” by IT standards and causes headaches for IT but sometimes it’s whatever gets the job done next week is what’s going to be in the businesses best interest.
Also a lot of these tools are used how they were designed to be used. If a couple people have a function they need fulfilled and some excel tool with macros can provide that in less than a month and save those people a ton of time then I don’t see a problem with it. Just make sure SLA is very clear make it clear they can’t blame IT if there’s problems, offer the best advice for risk management.
what do you mean, Excel isn’t a Database?
It is according to UK’s National Health Service: www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
There is an ODBC driver for Excel. Not to put data into Excel – To get it back out, treating it as if it were a database.
This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
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.
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.
One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that “well it’s too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal.”
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.
It shouldn’t matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don’t realize their value.
In fact, it’s illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone’s wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
A friend who is senior by two years found out that a new hiree was getting paid more than he does for the exact same role. Understandably, he was pissed and left.
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).
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.
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…
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.
HR says salary info is confidential.
HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
HR commited the very same offence
And gets away with it.
My dad asked if I could look at a spreadsheet he uses at work, maybe fix a couple of things that he has to manually adjust. This meme is frightfully accurate, the earliest parts of this thing are older than some of the junior devs on my team.
My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)
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
It was running fine until ppl really started getting sick!
I love Excel! The best part of my job is where I get to use Excel. The worst parts are where I have to use power point or interact with other people. Sadly, most of time is spent on PPT and interacting these days. :(
Nah, the worst part is when I have to watch someone else use Excel.
YOU DON’T NEED TO RIGHT CLICK AND SELECT COPY. YOU CAN JUST PRESS CTRL+C.
And virtually none of them know how to paste values, so all the templates end up messed up.
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school’s merch shop. It was the single worst thing I made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!
Did you know? Many published indexes (indexes like S&P500 etc…) are computed with excel
I TOTALLY trust their values
I am guilty of this. I have a set of fucking ghastly macros that do monthly number crunching for me. Currently moving it all into SQLite and R.
Guys, what is excel? Do you mean libre office calc?
“Here’s the sign up sheet for the Holiday meal!”
.xls
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…
I still can’t get over the fact that it was only a few weeks ago when I learned that Walter White is the same actor who played dad in Malcolm in the Middle. still blows my mind. What a prolific actor to take on such vastly different roles.
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.
Excel is a database, application/program with Microsoft forms, notepad, calculation tool, calculation report, sometimes used to make rudimentary sketches when PowerPoint is not convenient.
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey! I have you know the corporation I work for has an enterprise database system from 2002 with two whole maintainers.
Knitting pattern design
Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
Tell you something: I would have even more money for any instance where people used Lotus Notes for things it was never designed for. I would bet that this is the one program with the least applications that are actually working along the original design features.
And then people claim that Notes is a shitty program, because it was used in a way it was never ever built for (and the manual telling one that this is not a good idea).
At least they aren’t trying to use Powerpoint for computation…
Oddbin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It will live in a folder with:
Spreadhseet(1).xls Spreadsheet - shortcut.lnk Spreadsheet(2) - Copy.xls New Spreadsheet - DO NOT USE.xls
blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I have colleagues who have 20 copies of the same document with slight variations named like this in a folder. I honestly don’t understand how they function at work.
EatYouWell@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sort by last modified
droans@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I work in Finance at my company and we always save revised copies for Excel files instead of saving over.
But we also have strict rules on it. File name is always “xxxx_Workbook Template Name_MMDDYY.xlsx” or “_YYYY_MM.xlsx”, depending on how often it gets updated.
Older versions get moved to a subfolder. It helps us go back and find out what something was if there was a mistake or revert back if Excel done fucks up.
Hellstormy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s just versioning but worse!
freebee@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Could be they don’t.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Every tech noob user I see. Worse if it’s mac because 1) I cannot use it for the life of me and 2) almost every Mac user stores it in the same default downloads folder and won’t know what path it’s in unless they use the Finder tool.
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I just sort by date modified on my work folder and purge stuff older than a year. Anything of value was moved to its permanent home and properly document controlled.
It’s a river of trash yes but anything of value floats to the surface.
gazter@aussie.zone 11 months ago
It probably makes sense to them. I’m sure they’re looking at your git workflow wondering how you function!
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I routinely scan file shares to find the top oldest modified dates on files.