It will live in a folder with:
Spreadsheet(1).xls Spreadsheet - shortcut.lnk Spreadsheet(2) - Copy.xls New Spreadsheet - DO NOT USE.xls
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.
Sort by last modified
Could be they don’t.
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.
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.
Almost 24 hours and no one has commented on MMDDYY? I don’t know whether to be proud or disappointed.
As an European I just sigh and read on.
Could just use git…
using git on a bunch of XML files saved into a binary ZIP file with a
.xlsxfilename extension is a hell whose circle we have not yet discovered
That’s just version control but worse!
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.
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
Whew, glad you didn’t say it wasn’t a password manager…
My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding…
Our users have had access to Password Safe, then Keepass, then LastPass, now Keeper. Guess what still pops up in screen shares.
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.
My old company had a saved spreadsheet on the O:drive called “Passwords”
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
MS Access is a thing…
And it’s terrible.
It wasn’t that bad in 2003. Too bad it’s still stuck there.
exactly this. 200%
Power Platform with dataverse is essentially this
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.
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
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.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Its not that simple.
Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
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.
As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
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.
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.
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 depends on the scale. I’ll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.
They said inappropriate.
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 on 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. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
My client has an MBA. Please be gentle with him
My sides. 😂
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.
That makes sense if they’re transitioning people who have been doing it the old way for 20 years.
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.
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.
Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps 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 a 13 year old email thread:
wtf are ipynb apps?
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it
what do you mean, Excel isn’t a Database?
It is according to UK’s National Health Service: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
I love this part: “To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.”
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.
I saw a presentation in excel once, I want sum it up here, but it was pointless.
“Here’s the sign up sheet for the Holiday meal!”
.xls
And you only get a work phone to edit that file.
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…
Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
From the sounds of it, the company’s entire accounting system is done in a very old version of Excel. One Excel spreadsheet. Which is a very bad idea for so many reasons. If it’s not backed up and gets deleted or corrupted… everything is gone. Not to mention that there’s so many better ways to do your main accounting than Excel. Excel has it’s uses, just not…that.
Excellent, yes it was a company that spent multiple millions on SAP and everything went back to multiple versions of these excel spreadsheets the accountants maintained that contained all the costing, time, and labour rates. They also generated code to inject new SKUs into SAP. It seemed pretty fragile to me.
Excel has one purpose, data analytics, but as it is a very powerful tool in that regard, with loads of flexible features, people tend to use it in ways that will work for a surprisingly long time, before completely failing.
A common example is to build a database in Excel, say a product catalog with all features and pricing listen in dynamic fields, then someone writes a custom macro to interface the database with external systems, and as new employees join more code is written to make the database easier to update and edit, then more systems are brought in to interface with the database, more data is added, say materials needed in production to build said products, and time calculations to findout how long the different products will take to make, and what product you can make with what you have in inventory, and more macros and integrations.
And it keeps going, but Excel has a hard limit on how much data a sheet can contain, and with all of the new features and integrations it will just be a matter of time untill a new update from Microsoft breaks critical functionallity.
And as the Excel database is used for more and more stuff, it becommes more and more dangerous to the company, at the end you will have an unmaintainable mess that is kept alive on a Windows XP VM running MS Office 2003, since that is the latest system that can run the database with all integrations
A proper SQL database is far more efficient robust, and customizable, but require more indepth knowledge about programming.
True, but unless still using .xls instead of .xlsx chances of reaching the row limit on a sheet became rather small, even for very large companies. Many issues with the everything in excel hell, but the row limit isn’t a main one (anymore).
That is fair, I was perhaps a bit rash when bashing Excel on that point.
It does still happen. Even in new projects. It happened in Britain on their big COVID19.xls sheet
The problem is that many of these are xls files.
Step 1: load xls
Step 2: Save as csv
Step 3: ???
step 4: profit
Knitting pattern design
hmm what’s this about
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.
True, watching other people use Excel is painful. I used to have a coworker that was so good at Excel that she didn’t use a mouse at all and was way quicker than anyone else. She made me feel guilty whenever I was the one being watched because I knew she must be frustrated watching me do things with shortcuts and the mouse.
