I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet
ludic.mataroa.blog
ludic.mataroa.blog
Now, I was looking for actual arguments on why one should not use spreadsheets, and I haven't found anything really convincing in this post.
I agree with this, but I'm interested in example of things that can break.
Assuming I've not been badly burned by spreadsheets in an automated process, I would not be convinced by this post alone.
It would be interesting for instance as additional convincing arguments I could give to refuse spreadsheet use in a process.
But maybe this is not the point of this post.
- As another pointed out, the sheets tend to have no constraints on what users enter
- Users will tend to begin performing ad-hoc queries inside the spreadsheet, making reading it a nightmare later on - If you look away from three seconds, the data will be pivoted into a format that makes it super hard to move to a database later on
- People will start to keep multiple versions of the sheet around like 'analysis', 'analysis_final', and 'analysis_FINAL', scatter them around a network drive, and trust God to sort them out later
- Probably a million more things that I can't think up ad hoc
At work, I do relentlessly advocate for us not to use spreadsheets, though I certainly don't threaten people in this way. And that's because we have the resources to do things better, and instead of empowering people the right way, we get them to do everything in Excel instead of leveraging the real power of the appropriate technology. There's probably an extensive place for Excel, when wielded responsibly or in contexts where there's no way at all that you can afford the staff to manage a more robust solution.
And, most importantly, I was hoping the judge would be lenient if my lawyer could reasonably argue that I warned the victims.
Ok, thanks for the fun :-)
and thanks for the serious answer.
Although I don't agree 100% with this entry specifically, it is particularly refreshing to read something unfiltered, witty written and yet unafraid to meet controversy. (which don't often go hand in hand lately)
I give you, and only you, a pass to use these in the future.
It’s one of the reasons why MS is so big.
It’s so far entrenched in the business world, so even if Im also gonna kill myself the next time i have to do a fucking VLOOKUP and it craps out on me, I will have to do it because Johnny from accounting surely cant deal with SQL or anything else (pandas, gasp!).
Even if Microsoft would fuck up Windows badly and looses market share to other OSes, people will still be using Excel for the next one hundred years.
And yes, I have a private GitHub rep of VBA called the NecroVisualBasicon that I look at whenever my sanity is too close to recovery.
But openpyxl and tools like Gnumeric mean that .xlsx (really a compressed .xml archive) is a fine exchange format.
Nope. Nor a rational one.
While there is little more frustrating than a spreadhsheet pretending it's a database this seems like it was written by a first year IT associate who doesn't really understand either side of this cycle.
Their advice boils down to do something stupid with a higher support burden rather than understanding when to use each tool in the arsenal.
While I'm deeply sympathetic the author should be discussing their issues with a therapist rather than spreading this on the internet as of there's some real basis for it.
Instead, the software developers are complaining about people cutting their own hair, essentially.