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!
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.
I consider myself pretty knowledgeable with most computing tasks, not particularly great with basic spreadsheets, but unless there’s some kind of usable frontend to reliably manage a database, I mostly see databases as:
“A magic box that holds tons of cryptic information, would be tedious to open, risky to edit, risky to backup or migrate or update, and could corrupt at any moment.”
Maybe I should put more effort into learning DBs besides initializing them in a Docker compose and praying, but for human readable information that’s meant to be shared, I think you’re bang on the money when it comes to why spreadsheets are still so popular!
As someone who interacts with databases regularly… Yeah, that sounds about right.
I was recently working with another team’s feature to handle data retrieval for the end user, pretty front end but it was far too tightly coupled with db management concepts. How is a non-technical person supposed to know the difference between an inner join and a left join?
Not too long ago I suggested using cross apply to a senior dev I work with and they admitted they weren’t sure what that does or how to use it. People who don’t regularly work with databases have no chance.
I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.
Professionals do seem to use excel.
Holy fuck is it painful for anyone that knows what they are doing.
15000 rows. 120 columns. One sheet. Creation date: 2011. A dedicated computer. Working at a multinational company is bad for mental health.
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!
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.
I consider myself pretty knowledgeable with most computing tasks, not particularly great with basic spreadsheets, but unless there’s some kind of usable frontend to reliably manage a database, I mostly see databases as:
“A magic box that holds tons of cryptic information, would be tedious to open, risky to edit, risky to backup or migrate or update, and could corrupt at any moment.”
Maybe I should put more effort into learning DBs besides initializing them in a Docker compose and praying, but for human readable information that’s meant to be shared, I think you’re bang on the money when it comes to why spreadsheets are still so popular!
As someone who interacts with databases regularly… Yeah, that sounds about right.
I was recently working with another team’s feature to handle data retrieval for the end user, pretty front end but it was far too tightly coupled with db management concepts. How is a non-technical person supposed to know the difference between an inner join and a left join?
Not too long ago I suggested using cross apply to a senior dev I work with and they admitted they weren’t sure what that does or how to use it. People who don’t regularly work with databases have no chance.
I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.