• VYTSKA@lemm.ee
    31·
    1 year ago

    The amount of massive excel sheets I’ve seen in various departments, when I was working as an office IT was ridiculous.

    Some people had to wait for 30 seconds with every minor change and that was “normal”.

    Excel != Database

    • heird@lemmy.ml
      19·
      1 year ago

      I’ve worked for a massive corporation in which they had 300mb+ excel files they bought high specs computers just to have them load fast enough and searching would take 3 to 5 minutes we suggested that they’d try moving it to Microsoft access and the query became instant, I can’t imagine the hours wasted waiting for the queries to run

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        1 year ago

        My rule of thumb when Excel is still just fine:

        1. The data fits on the screen. Roughly 40x30 matrices are fine. These rules aren’t set in stone, so there are situations when it’s still justified to use matrices larger than that.
        2. You can see all the sheets you need. Roughly 10-14 sheets. If you need more sheets than that, you should probably split the calculation into several files.
        3. You need complicated VBA macros and you need them to run perfectly every time. In my experience, this programming language is infuriatingly unpredictable and unreliable. Random things happen all the time and no amount of debugging is able to solve these types of cosmic problems.

        You can go beyond those general guidelines, but using everything gets more and more annoying the further you go. Pretty soon you’ll realize it would have been better to build the whole thing in Python, R or something else. Once the file size hits 15 MB you know you’ve gone way too far and it’s about time you rebuilt the whole calculation using some nicer tool. I try to switch as soon as possible when I realize my calculations are about to grow beyond these limits.

  • nerdschleife@lemm.eeEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    2013-2016 excel is GOATed tbh. Usable and without the cloud bullshit Microsoft tried to push in the coming years

    (Yes, I still wish this wasn’t the industry standard office suite)

    • Hyggyldy@sffa.community
      8·
      1 year ago

      It seems to be solid for making calculators. I’ve used a number of build optimizers for various games that are made in Excel.

      Edit: Actually I guess they’re Google Sheets. Idk how the feature sets compare.

    • PerogiBoi@lemmy.caEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      You would be honestly very uncomfortable if you knew how much sensitive information is stored on the desktop of someone as an excel spreadsheet.

      • manny_stillwagon@mander.xyz
        10·
        1 year ago

        I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.

        At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.

        There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.

        • PerogiBoi@lemmy.caEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          You and I live similar lives in different places.

          There are people in my office that print out their emails to read at their desk, right in front of their computer.

          Collaborative document editing has been around for over a decade, and yet we’re still emailing each other different versions of docs.

          • manny_stillwagon@mander.xyz
            5·
            1 year ago

            Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.

            I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.

            • thebuoyancyofcitrus@beehaw.org
              4·
              1 year ago

              Some number of years ago, I was an intern within a department of state government. I was tasked with helping to enrich their databases. So they sent over an Excel file. I did my thing and added new columns, then I had to send it back over to someone within each division so they could do the data entry. To my horror, when I went to visit one of the division heads, I saw their admin sitting at a computer with a printout of my changes sitting on a document holder next to the screen…manually typing geographic coordinates into a data entry form.

  • gbuttersnaps@programming.dev
    6·
    1 year ago

    Having worked for a state government which maintained data for federal submissions in 15 different versions of the same giant excel file on 15 different computers, it’s scary how accurate this is.

    • Gork@lemm.ee
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’ve worked at private companies where this is the case too lol.

      This is true even when better software would work instead of the one-size-fits-all-but-isn’t-suitable Excel.

      Often to get it to work the way I want is through VBA scripting. And at that point I should be using other software but companies are cheap and don’t want to invest in better tech.

  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’m trying to move away and doing all I can with python (pandas, numpy and friends). Everything starts with a pd.read_excel() and finish with a df.to_excel().

    • Kresten@feddit.dk
      5·
      1 year ago

      I think the joke is twofold. First of all, Microsoft pretty much has a monopoly on financial software with their excel, which shows that the entire global finances are in the hands of that crab.

      The second joke, must be that they never bother updating the suite to the latest, and solely depend on 2013🤷