Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.
This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.
I only ever encountered Access was once many years ago and I was warned that it had issues with multiple users.
Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)
Well excel nowadays doesn’t have issues with concurrent users if you have office 365 like many companies do.
At that time it was Access with the files located at a company shared drive, the issue was concurrent writes I believe.
Yes, but at the time Excel didn’t support concurrency either ;-)
Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that’s only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.
Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn’t, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that’s how they envisioned it to work.
Better yet, put your access backend to OneDrive to acquire an un-openable, un-deletable file.
I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don’t have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.
No simple way to join tables though, which is still pretty shocking to me.
Last panel is wrong. Genie would just grant him an MBA from a top tier school
I once looked through a textbook from my friend’s MBA course. The first thing I noticed was in a highlighted box in the chapter on business negotiating: “Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”
These are the people that make 10X what I make.
This is why I refuse to get an MBA. I already know my pants go on my legs. Thanks.
taking notes On the legs, you say? Interesting…🤔
Should’ve been the version saying:
Geanie: “It is done”
Person: “But… nothing changed”
G: “Correct”
3gb CSV file goes brrrr…
Don’t be gross, use CSV files
CSV is great but the byte loss on numbers is sometimes gruesome.
I mean it’s a simple file format so it’ll perform better because it doesn’t have to decode any complex formats or protocols.
Big O? Never heard of it!
This is basically what I run for a living and it’s definitely not glamorous.
I feel you. Working in healthcare, ms office is the only thing consistently installed site wide I can take advantage of to run a db.
Couldn’t you use Access instead of Excel or is that not possible for your use case?
Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.
Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.
May I introduce you: webxcel
What the fuck. Thanks for sharing!
It can handle more than a million rows so why not?
My 5th rule would be “no ‘fix my IT problem without me telling you what the error message says’”. Because fuck that
Error 0x2e8da08150469
