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Comment by OzCrimson | Hacker News Reader

Again. What's the comparable alternative?

This is so frustrating because I've worked in small departments in an international company. Our problems were too small to get consistent, needed help from IT and we weren't important enough to get one of the limited licenses to the fancy reporting system.

Ultimately, there's all this bad talk about evil Excel, but we get no help or other resources.

And what about all the junk reports that were coming out of the company database that no one wanted to spend the money to fix?

THE ONLY VIABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS EXCEL.

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Real life doesn't always provide ideal solutions. In your case, using Excel is probably the easiest or even only way to do what's needed. That doesn't mean it's the best, or even a good solution. If it causes organization-wide problems, whoever runs your organization should make sure better processes are instilled. The only thing you can do is make it clear to the person above you and hope things improve.

We're closer in agreement. And I'd never suggest that Excel was the best solution or even a good solution at times. (I hated the tedious error-prone things that I used to do in Excel.)

I'm just offering the context from which weird stuff happens. And the answer isn't always as easy as: put it in a database.

The context, the processes (or lack of processes), the decision-makers, budgets, timelines, they all play a part in the outcomes.

The alternative depends on the people involved. In many instances it's a relational database, perhaps in combination with Excel for charts.

One thing Excel is extremely bad at is reliably importing data from CSV. It's unbelievable what errors you can get if you're not extremely careful.

I think the question is what a viable alternative is if the company does not want to spend any more effort than the effort of the singular employee that wants the report.

They can do it by themselves with Excel. Can they do that with any other software?

Yes, some can, but depends on the task.

Not many people would be able to do complex calculations in an RDBMS, especially if it requires joins or grouping. But many more are able to use a GUI tool to create a single database table and import some CSV data.

The recent UK disaster wouldn't have happened if the data had been imported into Access or SQLite instead of an Excel sheet.

Of course it's not a panacea. Badly designed databases can be just as error prone as Excel, but they have different error modes.

No. it's not the only alternative. it's the only thing you and many other accept. Python+Jupyter is a real alternative.

You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.

exactly. because he does not see a problem with this because people like you tell him it's the only solution since dawn of excel.

But when developers complain they have to learn domain specific items, people say the shall keep up with the times. but suddenly the analysts and the others are exempt from this?

R, or Python.

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