it always interesting when multi billion dollar company's costing system is a 63 tab excel 97 spreadsheet at it's core...
it always interesting when multi billion dollar company's costing system is a 63 tab excel 97 spreadsheet at it's core...
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.
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.
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.
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.
- She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
- Don't know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
- Everyone was pissed lol
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.
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.)
When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school's merch shop in excel and vbs. It was the single worst thing I have ever made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!
I saw a presentation in excel once, I want sum it up here, but it was pointless.
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 uses 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.
I zoom in on Walter White and try so hard to see Hal Wilkerson in there but I just can't.
Knitting pattern design
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).
If I had a nickel for every utility I worked with that handles billing of capital projects on a spreadsheet, I'd have 2... Which isn't a lot, but still odd that the backbone of their billing is excel
Image Transcription: Meme
Me if I had a dollar for every inappropriate use of Excel I've seen
[An image of a storage room, which contains a giant rectangle made of cash. There are two people standing near it]
At least they aren't trying to use Powerpoint for computation....
Nothing like designing and modeling a $100M piece of equipment using Excel
I can relate with powerpoint.
