I work as a network tech for a globally spanning ISP specializing in fiber services, handling major maintenances that are service effecting for business and government customers (SLAs are in effect). These maintenances are planned and tracked through various excel sheets - housed either in a shared network drive (so yeah, we may run into issues where multiple people are trying to edit the same doc at once), or excel tables in a SharePoint.
Prior to the merger of companies I recently went through, we had actual database systems to track this stuff that worked just fine. And now we’re relying on the same shit a grad student would use to track their doctorate progress. It’ll work until it doesn’t. Looking forward to the shit-show if it gets me overtime.
Fun fact: most of the electronic voting machines in the 2000 presidential election used Access to store vote counts. Access, the “database” with a user-editable audit table.
Isn’t the Genie usually depicted as malicious, or at least mischievous? I would expect the Genie to grant the wish, knowing what a shitshow it would be.
I once looked through a textbook from my friend’s MBA course. The first thing I noticed was in a highlighted box in the chapter on business negotiating: “Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”
You’ve probably had the experience of sharing the highways there with Germans cutting through your country to get to Austria and forgetting they were not on the Autobahn any more. I drove a rental car when I visited there years ago, and I’ve never had a more terrifying driving experience than looking in my rearview mirror and seeing empty road stretching back for miles, and two seconds later having a black BMW riding my ass and flashing its high beams at me.
Depends. It’s a business here and there are lots of young people with MBAs and not enough experience to contextualise the things learned within the masters. I mean, some are even doing it post grad.
From my past experience with these types of people, I have a very low opinion on young people with MBAs. Business degree holders who want a shortcut to the top.
My comment was mostly a self deprecating joke, denying the only neutral part of the statement. But you’re right, wide range of ages in any business program.
In my experience it doesn’t work well when you have more than a couple people editing the file. My company had a group of ten modifying the same file in live time; it led to huge desync problems.
I live in Excel hell and even that made me shudder. Just work on separate files and have a master spreadsheet append everything with power query.
I made a similar reply higher up and I fucking hate that that’s a solution but it legitimately would work in this use case. I frequently deal with 1M+ row data sets and our API can only export like 20k rows at a time so I have a script make the pulls into a folder and I just PQ to append the whole fucking folder into one data set. You don’t even have to load the table at that point, you can pull as-is from the data model to BI or make a pivot or whatever else you’re trying to do with that much data.
Parent company doesn’t want ANYONE to have direct read access to the database - only the scant few heavily formatted reports the user-facing software will allow. Data analysis still needs to get done though, so…
Yeah. PQ -> Data Model saves my ass and my co-workers think I’m a wizard.
That, and learning how to quietly exploit minor vulnerabilities in the software to get raw tables I “shouldn’t” have and telling not one soul has been a winning combo!
I imagine an alternate 4th panel wherein the genie says “ok you can bring back dead people.” What do yall think? Also I bet we could come up with a themed genie or setting that would punch up the joke too. ♡♡ love it BTW, op.
Japanese companies, this isn’t a wish, it’s a fundamental truth of the universe. Like gravity. No matter the scale or importance of them. I promise you your car exists because of an Excel 2003 file on some underpaid engineer’s laptop that they periodically sync with an inventory system.
I once worked for a Japanese company where I had to make a presentation. In Excel, I shit you not. Then we had one of our “shadow” managers make a Japanese translation of the same thing. It took me two days to get the kerning and print layout right, especially with that weird english typeface that is Japanese standard, I hate to think how long the translator took to get their version right.
I used to make a monthly document that was in English and Japanese. I used either Meiryo or Meiryo UI. That looked ok in both scripts but there is another font where the en looks shit. Or maybe I’m thinking of full width characters.
Honestly, since the introduction of ‘tables’, pivot tables, Power Pivot and Power Query, Excel is way more viable to be used as a database. Tables in particular mean that formulas fill down and the range automically resizes when records are added.
Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.
This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.
I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don’t have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.
Yes, but at the time Excel didn’t support concurrency either ;-)
Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that’s only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.
Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn’t, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that’s how they envisioned it to work.
i…isn’t that the entire point of excel? what is it for if not to store data?
similarly i remember a reddit comment that broke my brain, saying no one should be using excel, they should be using a ‘cell matrix organizer’ or similar. we all can name 5 off the top of our heads
Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.
Excel is this weird mix of storing small amounts of data but so good for visualizing data. If people are saying it shouldn’t be used to store data they mean massive amounts of data as opposed to something like some small scale accounting for a fund raiser.
Excel has a purpose, but storing data long term isn’t it. It’s for calculating data. It shouldn’t be the single source of truth.
One of the things Microsoft did to make it work was extending the row limit from 65k to 1M. Apparently, Economics professors were very excited about that one, which explains a lot.
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