Have You Seen the New Excel?

They used to say this exactly about databases. Small companies usually only need a spreadsheet.

> They need Excel.

They should also learn how to use it. Too many times I see people manually sorting rows by cutting and inserting them, when filters are just two clicks away! Filter it, copy the table, save it. Done. 3 hour job done in less than 10 seconds.

Or using pivot tables (i.e. for filtering reports with thousands of lines to find string which occurred the most and sort them by the occurrence).

Or automatically deduplicating rows (remove duplicates - choose columns, click and done.)

And the most outrageous cases of being Excel illiterate are people using calculator on the table and writing results back into Excel. These folks are already too far gone. Nobody can help them.

One of my early gigs was in a, for my country and the standards at the time (90s), large factory; they ran almost everything on Excel and Access. From the erp, hrm, crm, entry gates, phone system, truck loading bays, industrial systems if they could be accessed via Windows, cafetarias PoSs etc. VBA plugged into everything with the sysadmin doing 'version management' of 1000s of evolving data mixed with code files on networking (Novell I think when I was there) shares. They kept that up for quite a while until the sysadmin got ill; I was there to fix some issues in Access because he could not do it fulltime now. They replaced everything for far more expensive and inflexible erp and control software; it did no longer depend on one person working 247 though.

It's the best kind of satire, because it's based in a bit of truth!