His "arguments" are at the "This Is Gatekeeping" paragraph. It boils down to "spreadsheets are too fragile to be the foundation of any business-critical data pipeline"
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.