Mike told me there’s a book. It’s a real book. Epic FAIL.
Ramblings
Ramblings which occasionally resemble reality. This is the blog of Stewart Smith.
Mike told me there’s a book. It’s a real book. Epic FAIL.
Laugh all you want, but if it happens that Excel satisfies more than 50% of most users’ database needs (and I would argue that it may), then we’re the ones who are doing something wrong.
Excel meets the manipulation and visualization needs of a large proportion of the data out there. But provides an excruciatingly limited integrity and validation layer. Compounding the problem the data, logic, and presentation are intertwined so tightly that it is often impossible to debug once created.
This means that the systems built dependent on Excel for data entry or manipulation are highly susceptible to combinations of user and developer error.
There are also people who think that Excel should be a page layout program for creating forms for you to fill out.
Then wonder why, when they print them out, they can’t read all the text that was entered..
At my previous job, we were doing a trial of OpenOffice.org (1.something). One of the complaints about the spreadsheet was that it could only handle 32000 rows, while Excel could handle 65000 rows (the OOo limit has since been lifted). You can probably guess what they were using Excel for …