this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it's an absolute monster.
(it's essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can't be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i'm the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet's script and the guy who originally created it doesn't work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don't get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it's still in use, but yeah.
“Only a trainee…”
Sounds like you’re the only one keeping that thing running. Don’t sell yourself short!
my boss does appreciate what i'm doing but i just don't have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
Until it has an odbc connection to a sql server or access db it’s still low level wizardry.
you can access sql from excel? i am now officially horrified.
Next time you open excel go to the data tab and look at all the things it can do.
It really shouldn't do those things, but it can.
Since the 90s for a lot of it…
You can issue queries, import and transform the data on demand.
well excel IS a database
Including running a 3D graphics engine... with raytracing
I once saw a post on reddit where a bored guy in his office stream movies from his home PC to Excel.
It's turning complete, so it's should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I'm not sure, if it's autocorrect or misinformation, but it's "Turing complete", after Alan Turing.
It’s as in once you try it there is no turning back