(bonus points if it’s being used for official business purposes)
A Google Sheet used as a password manager that every employee had access to. To keep it “secure” the cells with the passwords were hidden by changing the background color to match the text color.
Oh dear…
I don’t even understand how that would get past even the first couple of people using it. I imagine the idea was that they’d copy/paste the value into the password field. But did nobody ever paste the password into somewhere other than a password field and realize, “Hey, I can see this password!”…even accidentally?
Company-internal service where the users would write their desired configuration into an Excel file. Then they push that into a Git repo, which triggers a deployment of the service with the configuration read from all the Excel files.
i was unfortunately responsible for this one…
we developed a wireless communication protocol which was specified in an excel sheet, and it fell on us devs to implement the message types specified in the sheet. however since the specification kept changing we had to constantly update the message types in our tests to make sure they conformed. so i said “fuck it” and built a program that allowed me to “import” an excel file in a python program, which exposed all messages as classes that could be instantiated with automatic unit conversions. just drop the excel file of the day in the right place and run the test suite.
anyway that’s how the excel sheet became the formal API definition
Creative solutions…
To send images for graphic design.
Lmao…
The client needs it as a table. Excel does tables, so this is the best way.
Maybe they even locked the cells to prevent downloading the images (but not screenshots lol)? (I’m trying to be generous here)
My company uses excel for costing proposals (not crazy). In order to accurately cost, they decided to include everyone’s salaries. I was all for it because the transparency helps keep everyone fairly compensated, but some were less enthused. Sadly gone now.
LMAO
I love the transparency, but yikes.
I bet someone said “We can protect this information by making the text of the salaries white!”
Thats more work than it’s worth. Just black out the cells instead.
A CRM for a large client. A VERY large client.
An oil company which had an MS access DB and a form configured for it with no checks for formatting that would insert the fields of the form directly into the database, and then if they wanted to make a change, they would export the entire database as csv, open it in excel, make changes and use that to overwrite the entire database.
This had been going on since some time in the 1990’s. They finally wanted to move to a modernized databasing/operations solution which is what my company does.
I successfully cleaned 75% of that data, however it took 37 regular expressions and a script that was about 800 lines to account for every possible mis-entry, incorrect format, and merging fields if they were empty from newest records to oldest records until the fields were no longer empty where possible (essentially collapsing the records together to get as much data on each unique object which may have had N records over time through the database).
It is UN-BELIEVABLE what actual businesses get away with.
There’s the guy who built a roller coaster . https://youtu.be/yYaLQ3LazYM
Sex tracker… So many empty sheets…
In my case, it would be blank.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
The tracing of Covid in the UK (specifically England) was collected in .xls files
Biologists love excel, and it makes sense why - the sheer convenience of copying and pasting across datapoints.
If you gave them a form for data entry, they’d be rewriting the same data over and over again
It started its life as a tool to track the contents of promotional SKU’s, but different stakeholders kept adding increasingly complicated logic until it all depended on huge array formulas and VBA, and a recalculation took 1, then 2, then 5, then 15, then 30 minutes on a laptop, at which point we abandoned the whole thing and everyone went back to keeping track of their own piece manually.
lmao
Everyone has some great ideas, and everyone needs to put their ideas in the same spot. And everyone needs those complex formulas right in there…lol
A works/construction department in a medium-sized town. They had an Excel spreadsheet that had a HUGE number of screens. Anyone wanting to do commercial real-estate construction had to not only fill out these forms, but keep them uptodate and submit the updates at end of each work day.
The thing was HUGE and had lots of interdependent screens, where if you picked an item from a dropdown menu, it unlocked a bunch of other complicated screens or panels, and so forth. Each screen had 30-40 items and fields on it, and there were multiple dozens of screens you had to tab through.
To run it on the jobsite, construction contractors HAD to buy a pen and touchscreen Windows ‘tablet’ ($$$). The whole thing had been written and maintained by one guy over the course of a few years.
EVERYONE hated it. The guy who had written it wanted to get promoted to management, but nobody else wanted to maintain it so he was stuck.
A government case management system with thousands of citizens data along with their citizens numbers next to their full address, used for active cases relating to people and their money. This spreadsheet was on the desktop of a coworker and that coworker only.
