we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
Including running a 3D graphics engine… with raytracing