In my experience, Excel gets a lot of developer hate primarily for two reasons.
1.) They’ve seen it abused way too often. Things like using a workbook as a database or placing a copy to a shared one on everybody’s desktop and treating it like it’s a distinct application. In total fairness, Excel was not designed for either of those scenarios.
2.) They don’t know how to use it effectively.
To be clear, I’m no Microsoft fan and there are legitimate things to hate about Excel. But, it can be a very valuable tool in your toolbox if used properly.
Excel’s bread and butter is data analysis and for that it is a phenomenal tool. Despite many claims to the contrary that I’ve heard over the years, none of the other spreadsheet programs currently available can fully match it’s capabilities.
I can take data sets from a variety of different sources and parse, combine, refine, and distill them down to a really nice looking report that someone upstairs can read in a small fraction of the time it would take me to whip up an application to accomplish the same thing. If they want to adjust the the fields on the report, it’s super easy to make some quick changes to a pivot table.
There is a point where Excel is no longer the best tool for the job. In my opinion, the most obvious indicator that this point has been reached is when there’s a need for multiple people to manipulate the contents of a workbook. When that starts happening, it’s time to look for a more scalable solution. If data in an Excel workbook is being used as the “source of truth”, as in raw data is being stored in it rather than it pulling the raw data from elsewhere, that’s a recipe for disaster.
That said, I also realize that not every organization has the same resources. I’ve worked with plenty of small non-profits that don’t have the money to hire devs to create nice fancy software suites for them and primarily work off of spreadsheets. It’s not ideal but it’s understandable. If they’re doing good work, I’m not going to judge them too harshly for using Excel as a database. In those situations, I usually suggest having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and solid, frequent data backups.
One of my old bosses, who was an electrical engineer, liked to say, “The choices are often not between right and wrong but somewhere between worst and best”. Sometimes Excel is a good tool for the job. Sometimes it isn’t. Knowing when a particular tool is the right one is learned by experience.
Excel is the second best tool for any application. If I need analysis I usually use python with pandas and matplotlib + seaborn. Does everything I need faster than Excel. I do use Excel because I’m forced to but not for data analysis - I have seen it all from forms to schematics to differential equations - everything done with excel. It can work… but I still hate it :)
Excel (all spreadsheet applications) are an integrated environment for non linear functional programming with flexible data structures, where you can see all memory and data at the same time. It’s a marvel.
cries in corporate job
Excel
Nah dawg.
Employees of many corporations don’t have the luxury of choice. Apparently you do - more power to you!
Employees at any corporation doing this exact job should probably know how to use a database, tbh.
Oh if only that were true
Any questions?
*sigh
No, Patrick.
Excel is not a database.
It’s not, and I think that Excel is often used where other tools would be more-appropriate because of existing expertise with Excel, but you don’t necessarily need to use a database for all tasks where a bunch of data gets stored.
I have plenty of scripts that deal with large amount of schlorped up data that just leave it in a text file, and Unix has a long and rich tradition and toolset for using text files for data storage and processing data in them in bulk.
GNU R, a statistics package, has a lot of tools to schlorp up data from many sources, including scraping it from the web, and storing it large data frames to be processed and maybe visualized. It’s probably rather more performant than databases for some kinds of bulk data processing.
Okay, so…is it appropriate here?
One thing that spreadsheets can be handy for is for making specialized calculators that plonk some data into some simple model and spit out a result. Having, say, the current temperature in a given city may be a perfectly reasonable input to make available to a spreadsheet, I think.
