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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

I was always kind of surprised that apps that use MS Office as a front-end for managing online data never really became a thing. Given how many gazillions of people are familiar with Office, and how much you can accomplish behind the scenes with tools like VBA it always felt like something that would inevitably emerge someday. But it never really did.

Maybe the problem was that gazillions of people are familiar with Office, but none of them actually like it? Or as we might term it, the "Lotus Notes Problem."

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Excel has that functionality, and has had it for a long time. It is used a lot, at least I've seen it used a lot, for internal functions such as workflow MIS (on wall mounted displays no less, that no one knew was Excel as we'd hidden anything Excel-like, like grids and menus / title bars, etc -fantastic to hack a quick solution, for example a visitor was coming, and we'd switch to a one-off sheet "Welcome XXX visitor" for 20 seconds through the day, that hack took 5 minutes, super easy) and general data functions.

As well as connections to conventional databases, SharePoint integration is a big thing - have a little macro that does a refresh (and a second one that mimics the movement of a mouse so the mandatory screensaver doesn't turn on).

The problem could be the VBA hurdle. It's enough of a hurdle that you would need an actual developer to go beyond basic functionality. At that point, a developer would just recommend you use whichever hammer the developer is holding or is most interested in at the moment.

The exception to this seems to be MS Access. I have come across multiple situations in which business users end up using MS Access for applications. I don't know if it was set up for them by developers initially, but it was clear to me that they continued to enhance it based on their needs without developer assistance.

I used to do a lot of Excel programming, and I found the environment to be extremely unstable. I've had spreadsheets with thousands of entries with data that would just become corrupted or erased for no discernible reason. It really turned me off from using it as a regular tool.

True, but that's not really what I was getting at -- I meant, just using Office as a front end for managing data that's actually stored somewhere else, like in a real database that cares about things like "consistency" and "durability."

I was doing a lot of this 12-14 years ago, building Access VBA front-ends to remote data sources in Oracle or MySQL (not PostgreSQL because its ODBC driver was practically unusable) and using Word and Excel for reports and publishing.

It was a fast and easy way to build a fairly complex GUI, much better than anything we have for the web. It was also very stable—except for COM Automation, which was slow and error-prone (e.g. having Access drive Word for a mail merge.) Many of these applications are still in use to this day.

What killed it for me was having the code stuck in the GUI builder rather than in text files. This meant that source control and testing demanded a lot of painful manual drudgery (and discipline, which not all the developers working on these applications had.)

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