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.)
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
It was 50-50 relief vs panic
And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
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.
You know… If that is true, it’s possible you may suffer from face blindness
My wife grew up with it her whole life and didn’t realize it was abnormal until she was about 30. Apparently it’s more common than you’d think, and if washer most people have no idea it even exists, even if they have it.
deleted by creator
Yeah man I hear you, you might just be retarded.
There is a skit from Sat Night Live with Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul that is a spoof of their real lives as celebrities. Up to a point he is mild mannered, and then suddenly he gets very dark and serious. He is really good at portraying an aloof person and turning it on a dime. Point is in the that skit you certainly can see both.
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.
Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don’t have experience personally with that program, I’ve heard it’s miles better for that type of work than excel
Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it’s definitely better in that regard than Excel.
But of course it also has it’s limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I’ve definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
Government runs on Access.
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
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.
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.
Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
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.
Good, thats what sick time is for…
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can’t be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren’t in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can’t just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
Sounds like you have too much work for the amount of people if one person leaving cripples you all so hard.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it’s still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don’t care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn’t an argument on the merits of having sick time available it’s just a dick move to use it when you don’t need it when there’s more than enough time to use when it’s actually needed.
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.
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…
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe. Ransomware blocks the company’s access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn’t stolen, it’s just unusable
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…
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
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.
It’s more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
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.
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.
Nothing like designing and modeling a $100M piece of equipment using Excel
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
Edit - it seems y’all should save up for a sense of humor anyway
- Comment replies should be somewhat relevant to the topic
- Jokes should be funny
- It doesn’t cost money to have a sense of humor
- Jokes should make people laugh
Ok but this is a shitpost community
Root beer.
Put that Excel sheet in Onedrive and you have a networked accounting software solution with rights management.
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
Didn’t the UK’s covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel
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!
