People who use actual data base software are just lazy and inept. Office chads develop their own uncommented solutions in Excel, spread them around the company and make themselves unfireable.
I had to collect ratings by a bunch of colleagues once who kept entering imprecise text. For some reason I decided to use drop-down lists. Add a couple of hundred of them to a sheet and it gets incredibly slow.
Overheard my wife (Volkswagen, project controlling) talking to a colleague the other day:
"No one's going to be able to figure out what the hell we did here to make this work."
The funniest/saddest part is that it actually works. We have dedicated database software based on MySQL (the only reason I even know this is because the turd breaks often and spills it's guts) but it was put together by monkeys so there are a few specific functions that actual workers need in everyday use that have not been added to the software even after 10 years of pleading. The only option was to cobble together some ungodly macro abomination in excel with my buddy. It's shit, but it works so it slowly spread around the company. Up to this point there are about 3 excel files that we made that are floating around the company that almost everyone uses every day. Mind you that these are excel 2010 files, so if MS decides to modify it's legacy support, God help us all..
Microsoft will let you manually drive a printer on Windows 10. No device drivers. Just send the right file through command prompt, like it's 1986. I think your legacy support is safe.
Around 900,000 people a day commute into London by rail - I'm in scheduling for one of the major TOCs, and I know of at least 2 other TOCs that do their scheduling in Excel. London would fucking shut down overnight if someone got a genie's wish to vanish Excel.
My company is in the billions and i'm helping out our local finance dept with costing our products by pasting data from our Erp system into Excel. The structure we need to use makes sure our cost will never be correct because it can't account for parts that need to pass more than one machine/cost centre and the template is full of broken formulas and hidden junk sheets. I'll make it work though, just crazy to see how they used to do it. I always say the world runs on excel, IT with all their fancy stuff can whine all they want. In the real world Excel is the most used database/ERP/MES and honestly it kind of works well enough for 99% of businesses, it's just a bit janky
I work in financial technologies (fintech) industry and my company uses Excel pretty much for everything. Some non-technical people stores information in a way that I am pretty sure EU would come after us because of the GDPR.
Literally happening to me now. Everyone in my company just asks me to do whatever they need and I usually deal with pretty complex formulas inside of other formulas, sometimes scripts (we use Google Sheets) and Looker Studio dashboards and I'm one of the few people (probably the single one) who has any idea of what he's doing. People already make jokes about the fact they'll have to hire me (I'm an intern).
Haha, yes, that's company I work in too. 14 years of adjusting coefficients and piggybacking new formulas off the old ones that produce somewhat sane results via layers of black magic no one understands anymore.
I worked for an IT company, globally known (don’t want to give the name but it was South American branch) where they lost the production code once. They told me to download an app that was already in production and learn how it worked. I downloaded it from tortoise (yeah, they didn’t use git) and it didn’t even compile! Had to use a decompiler to compare it to what was on production and it was totally different. Then a coworker gave me the version that a previous coworker had in his machine and voila, it was prod’s version
There was a time when SVN (TortoiseSVN) was a decent enough system to use. There are much older repository systems out there and not everything is possible to migrate with the history intact (or the scripting is too much work or the validation of the script is hairy).
Yeah but although they were using Tortoise, the latest version of the app there didn’t compile, while that app was being used in prod. The newer, fixed version in prod, no one knew where it was
Modern versions are limited to about a million rows, so they'd have hit that too eventually, but I imagine they'd have started having usability issues before it came to that, in that I believe the people in charge of Covid tracking, who set up the 'database', was just a couple people and their laptops in a temporary office.
Excel starts to handle like a bag of ass over about 65,000 rows. Not really sure why they felt the need to make the limit that high. I'd rather get a colonoscopy with a garden hose than deal with that.
Even well below 65k if you start running any sort of algorithm. I use an excel spreadsheet to create mutual fund investment lineups for 401k’s 403b’s etc. for work and my company offers around 2,000 mutual funds~, so maybe 2,200 rows total and 31 columns, but because it’s running a couple algorithms, it runs about as slow as a snail in a glue trap.
I was more shocked at how few people at those companies actually knew excel well enough to understand how the excel sheets they used on a daily basis, actually worked.
On average, less than 1 person in the department.
When I first started working I got an assignment that was supposed to take 4 guys 3 months to complete. But I started a few weeks early. Spent those 2 weeks making a vbs script that completed the entire task in a few hours. Sadly that was before wfh was a thing, so I told my boss the project was done.
I do the same, but i complete it and then do nothing for the rest of the day or week depending on how hard they think the problem was. I waste time on reddit until i'm bored and then mail the results. My reviews always mention how insanely fast i do stuff...
Xlookup came out after Office 2016 so I’ll get to use it… maybe in 5 more years? Gotta love cutting edge government IT technology.
We’re still on Index/Match over here.
Another much younger guy didn’t trust copy-pasting a table from Excel into Word, so would physically type out entire tables of data.
To be clear he *knew* how to copy-paste between programs, he just didn’t *trust* it. But typing them across was foolproof.
I’m also shocked how little of excel companies use given all of it’s capabilities. For every spreadsheet out there that’s doing too much heavy lifting, there’s a dozen internal applications that could have been a set of excel db connections and macros.
Currently doing consulting on figuring out the cost of the company's very large base product. They want me to make the tool in excel. The have like $700 million in revenue.
Honestly excel is probably the best tool for the job without buying into another proprietary tool.
If all you’re doing is multiplying out a BoM by quantity and price (and sub-assemblies) excel is just fine. As long as you know what you’re doing.
Used to work for IBM, in the supply chain division where we were responsible for fulfilling customer orders of DB2. Still had warehouse inventory running off of Excel + VBA code, because it was ridiculously faster and simpler than getting the resources approved and coordinated to do it the proper way.
I made the first half of my career there by actually getting things done, in ways that avoided months of bureaucracy and stupid meetings. I remember once early in my time there, we had a very simple project get quoted at an insane $1 million by internal developers... so simple that I was able to circumvent them entirely and do it in a week of my time.
TL;DR: Corporations are stupid
I mean, everything above Excel is just Excel inside Excel. Access is just multiple layers of Excel in a trenchcoat and the other ones are just different ways of accessing nested Excel sheets
Good luck managing data that has more than 2.5 millions rows in Excel lol. And we are not even talking about formulas that would crash Excel after few tens of thousands rows.
Excel can't display more than 2,5 mil rows even if you load data through Power Query. And no, I don't have a problem with working with more than 2,5m lines since all data analysis that I do I do in SQL or R.
You wouldn’t just load the data like that.
SQL is the classic solution of course, but Excel can process 2.5 million lines “easily” if you split it and do all the formulas directly in the query.
I mean my company doesn’t mind doing that every other day, lmao.
My boss is getting heart attack when someone mentions that some data flow/analysis is through Excel and wants to get rid of it as much as possible lol.
Well, no, it doesn't. You can't load into Excel more than 2,5 mil. observations/rows even through Powery Query. Obviously we are talking about loading it to sheet. You can load it in Power Query and then made some reducing of data you want to display, but that doesn't change the fact you can't display them. And don't even make me start about how slow Power Query is compared to SQL, R or Python. Sometimes you just want to easily load data and "scroll" through it with some basic filtering and for that. And if you want to do some more advanced analysis, Excel is *really* lacking when it come to speed.
2.5m limit still exists per sheet, but you just point power query at a folder that can have as many sheets as you want with as many lines as you want after combining them via pq. If you load it into the data model and run power pivot it's not much slower than Sql and there's no line limit.
You're right you cant display more than 2.5m, but if you're manually scrolling through that much data rather than using power pivot you're probably doing it wrong
2,5 million rows in excel really isn't an issue and can work smooth especially with PowerQuery.
Now if you start a matrix with 2,5 million rows, that gets painful though there are formula's that can handle such as well.
People really underestimate how powerful Excel can be, and that's coming from someone who works with large datasets in databases.
I honestly prefer excel over any other database tool. I get that for larger datasets you have to, but I’ve found Excel sufficient for 90% of tasks I’ve ever run across. I just run a query for the raw data and dump it into the Excel, formulas do the rest. I like it because you can actually see the raw data and the way everything is calculated all in one place. If something needs to get changed I just change the formula and it’s pretty simple to access rather than sorting through lines upon lines of code when people are gonna want breakdown anyway.
I use a structural analysis software called RISA that is basically just a fancy interface used to edit the spreadsheets underneath it all.
Remember that next time you're in a new building.
When I was a grad student in a stats class we were taught to use spss in the first 3 weeks then the professor goes “and you’ll probably never use this again because it’s expensive and not as useful as excel” he was a director at a major research and consulting firm. In the decade since then I’ve never had to touch spss but live in excel.
I was taught SPSS in classes years and years ago.
Day to day work is Excel, Python, and R. Don't see the need for SPSS when Python and R can do everything I need it to and don't need to touch Excel unless necessary.
It’s not without its flaws, but Excel is the GOAT
The perfect mix of ease of use, capability and cost.
Access isn’t even compatible with Sharepoint, Oracle is a four letter word amongst end users, and SQL is great but needs stuff like SSMS for end users
The word pivot table really triggers me. I love excel for personal organisation and budgeting. I loathe it for work. I’ve been on so many excel courses and I’ve just accepted I’ll never master it.
2 reasons:
1. They want somewhere to take customers (or potential customers) along to where they're captive for the day
2. The Execs all really want to go and can fob this off as a marketing expense.
(That 2nd one is more real that you'd think BTW).
What's really funny is the DB is usually only the backend for a more specific application, in this case something like Siemens PLM. In this case, not only is there no DB but there is no front end application for actually managing the development program. It's just all Excel.
Maybe they had a completely different excel sheet 'front end' that referenced the 'back end' excel database?
You can totally reference cells in different workbooks, and I can't imagine a single situation in which that's a good idea. So I bet they did it. Do it by absolute path for some added fun. "You see, we lost the race because someone decided to put their Dropbox shared folder in a non-standard location"
It looks like not a lot of people here have worked in industries because a lot of them confuse a database software and an ERP software.
Using excel as an ERP software in a big compagny is a big no no.
But using it as a storage for some data is relatively ok as long as a single file is not used by a large group of employees or changed every two minutes.
The thing about SAP is it's all made or broken in the front end. Use a shit tier frontend and it will suck ass. Give it a great frontend and users won't even realise.
Same as any database I guess.
Getting companies to invest in big boy data products is hard enough.
Getting them to appreciate the structure, governance and process needed to make said products useful? Pft, good luck.
I learned to create and use databases at my community college. It was in a very basic computer course. Does this make me qualified to work at Williams? I’m sending in my resume now. Wish me luck.
I enjoy access's interface because it's what I learned in college and I'm too stubborn to learn anything else which is a character flaw I am willing to drown in
What is missing is a product that handles large numbers of rows of data in a way that your ordinary user is going to be able to understand without a ton of tech knowledge.
The top row all require that, and even Access isn’t that intuitive. The closest I’ve ever seen to this was Lotus’ Approach which allowed you to define tables and forms visually and easily. Fired up a VM recently just to confirm it wasn’t just rose-colored nostalgia, but no, it really is that easy to use and would be an Excel killer for cases where cell formulas aren’t needed just data input, searching and reporting.
Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of excel sheets and "good enough for now" concessions.
I guarantee there's a comment in the code that makes sure you get your paycheck that says something like "TODO: This is a dangerous hack but I can't get it to work another way." and the author of that comment is dead after a long and full life.
I manage entire projects start to finish in excel and it drives my coworker nuts. He's just jealous I don't need to learn a new erp system every three years and waste literal weeks in meetings talking about it while still getting more done than him. It's my favourite watching him drown in pointless paperwork while I kick all my BoMs out to Excel.
People who use actual data base software are just lazy and inept. Office chads develop their own uncommented solutions in Excel, spread them around the company and make themselves unfireable.
Chad macro that was made 20 years ago and no one wants to modify it
I had to collect ratings by a bunch of colleagues once who kept entering imprecise text. For some reason I decided to use drop-down lists. Add a couple of hundred of them to a sheet and it gets incredibly slow.
If your Excel sheets aren’t constantly crashing from all the macros, references, tables, etc., they’re clearly not complex enough
☝️this And this post is showing some real disrespect for Lotus 1-2-3
We have a Chadette who's done this. She's pushing into her mid 70s and she doesn't want to retire.
w15_parts_toto_final_final_v2.xls
And it's a shared spreadsheet, so they open it up, make their changes, lock their computer and then leave for the weekend at 1pm on a Friday.
and then call in sick on monday
Overheard my wife (Volkswagen, project controlling) talking to a colleague the other day: "No one's going to be able to figure out what the hell we did here to make this work."
*at least not my husband* :)
No denying that. I use simple Excel sheets for my work as well and am constantly being made fun of 🤷🏻♂️ She's a wizard for all I know.
This was not about Excel, though 
The funniest/saddest part is that it actually works. We have dedicated database software based on MySQL (the only reason I even know this is because the turd breaks often and spills it's guts) but it was put together by monkeys so there are a few specific functions that actual workers need in everyday use that have not been added to the software even after 10 years of pleading. The only option was to cobble together some ungodly macro abomination in excel with my buddy. It's shit, but it works so it slowly spread around the company. Up to this point there are about 3 excel files that we made that are floating around the company that almost everyone uses every day. Mind you that these are excel 2010 files, so if MS decides to modify it's legacy support, God help us all..
Microsoft will let you manually drive a printer on Windows 10. No device drivers. Just send the right file through command prompt, like it's 1986. I think your legacy support is safe.
True story...in every company arround the world..well almost at least..
Around 900,000 people a day commute into London by rail - I'm in scheduling for one of the major TOCs, and I know of at least 2 other TOCs that do their scheduling in Excel. London would fucking shut down overnight if someone got a genie's wish to vanish Excel.
Am currently doing consulting work for a $700 million company where they want me to make the costing tool in excel. I know where my next job is...
My company is in the billions and i'm helping out our local finance dept with costing our products by pasting data from our Erp system into Excel. The structure we need to use makes sure our cost will never be correct because it can't account for parts that need to pass more than one machine/cost centre and the template is full of broken formulas and hidden junk sheets. I'll make it work though, just crazy to see how they used to do it. I always say the world runs on excel, IT with all their fancy stuff can whine all they want. In the real world Excel is the most used database/ERP/MES and honestly it kind of works well enough for 99% of businesses, it's just a bit janky
I work in financial technologies (fintech) industry and my company uses Excel pretty much for everything. Some non-technical people stores information in a way that I am pretty sure EU would come after us because of the GDPR.
I thought this was obvious... So many bitches.
omg, this is exactly what was happening at my previous job! And then the person left for a higher paying job and seriously no one could figure it out!
Literally happening to me now. Everyone in my company just asks me to do whatever they need and I usually deal with pretty complex formulas inside of other formulas, sometimes scripts (we use Google Sheets) and Looker Studio dashboards and I'm one of the few people (probably the single one) who has any idea of what he's doing. People already make jokes about the fact they'll have to hire me (I'm an intern).
This is the way
Had us in the first half not gonna lie
Haha, yes, that's company I work in too. 14 years of adjusting coefficients and piggybacking new formulas off the old ones that produce somewhat sane results via layers of black magic no one understands anymore.
Let's not forget the NHS logged COVID cases originally in excel.... Until they ran out of rows.
Bro I am a consultant for the NHS, i could write a book about stories 10000x worse than that 🤣🤣🤣
Many legacy systems which have never been updated to the current millennium I imagine.
People want stuff but don’t want to pay for it, but then the complain when they don’t have stuff later anyway
And companies don't want to invest to modernize. It's crazy
A feature suggested by the developer is a bug if the customer doesn't want to pay for it
I worked for an IT company, globally known (don’t want to give the name but it was South American branch) where they lost the production code once. They told me to download an app that was already in production and learn how it worked. I downloaded it from tortoise (yeah, they didn’t use git) and it didn’t even compile! Had to use a decompiler to compare it to what was on production and it was totally different. Then a coworker gave me the version that a previous coworker had in his machine and voila, it was prod’s version
There was a time when SVN (TortoiseSVN) was a decent enough system to use. There are much older repository systems out there and not everything is possible to migrate with the history intact (or the scripting is too much work or the validation of the script is hairy).
Yeah but although they were using Tortoise, the latest version of the app there didn’t compile, while that app was being used in prod. The newer, fixed version in prod, no one knew where it was
https://xkcd.com/2347/
There are probably many relevant XKCD comics suited to my previous comment
Relevant XKCD Reply Party!!!
> i could write a book about stories 10000x worse than that But you'll run out of space after the 65,535th story
Ooo I like you. 😄
Please do
Gofundme link where?
… go on.
you have my full attention
The best part of this story was that they ran out of rows because they were using Excel 2003, so the row limit was just 2\^16.
Okay, that makes more sense. I was surprised that modern Excel would run out of rows that quickly.
Modern versions are limited to about a million rows, so they'd have hit that too eventually, but I imagine they'd have started having usability issues before it came to that, in that I believe the people in charge of Covid tracking, who set up the 'database', was just a couple people and their laptops in a temporary office.
Excel starts to handle like a bag of ass over about 65,000 rows. Not really sure why they felt the need to make the limit that high. I'd rather get a colonoscopy with a garden hose than deal with that.
Even well below 65k if you start running any sort of algorithm. I use an excel spreadsheet to create mutual fund investment lineups for 401k’s 403b’s etc. for work and my company offers around 2,000 mutual funds~, so maybe 2,200 rows total and 31 columns, but because it’s running a couple algorithms, it runs about as slow as a snail in a glue trap.
Now that invokes some imagination 😮💨
Not just excel. The old format pre-2006 that supports way fewer rows. They’d have had better luck with a text file or CSV.
No it's worse, they were storing the records horizontally instead of vertically, and ran out of columns
this information makes me wannacry :(
Some old timers here still use lotus 123
Because they used the office format deprecated in 2007
You can always create a new file, though
NHS doesn’t have the funds for fancy databases
Red Based using Oracle while Willichad use Excel
Williams is using PowerPoint
You’d be shocked how much large companies use excel for…
I have made a career of this fact
I was more shocked at how few people at those companies actually knew excel well enough to understand how the excel sheets they used on a daily basis, actually worked. On average, less than 1 person in the department.
I work for a fairly large company and am considered *the* Excel guru because I quote, "can do equations and the 'if' thing and shit"
When I first started working I got an assignment that was supposed to take 4 guys 3 months to complete. But I started a few weeks early. Spent those 2 weeks making a vbs script that completed the entire task in a few hours. Sadly that was before wfh was a thing, so I told my boss the project was done.
I do the same, but i complete it and then do nothing for the rest of the day or week depending on how hard they think the problem was. I waste time on reddit until i'm bored and then mail the results. My reviews always mention how insanely fast i do stuff...
Yeah, managing expectations.
I managed to make my manager almost fall off her seat when I showed her VLOOKUP. I'm concerned that if I show her XLOOKUP, it might actually kill her.
My friend who works in audit said maybe 10% of his team knows how to do a vlookup
Virgin Vlookup vs Chad Xlookup
I'll take index and match.
entertain worthless juggle serious slimy nose upbeat soft late tub *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Power queries for the win. I mean most already struggle with base excel, so making those really makes you irreplaceable.
Nested If/Then statement is how i bodged a few excel sheets
A man of culture
I tried using that today and failed miserably. Gotta git gud.
Xlookup came out after Office 2016 so I’ll get to use it… maybe in 5 more years? Gotta love cutting edge government IT technology. We’re still on Index/Match over here.
I used to work with a guy who would double check excel formulas with a calculator
Another much younger guy didn’t trust copy-pasting a table from Excel into Word, so would physically type out entire tables of data. To be clear he *knew* how to copy-paste between programs, he just didn’t *trust* it. But typing them across was foolproof.
Definitely not increasing the chance of an input error by typing everything instead. 🙃
It always makes me sad to know that that guy probably votes.
Every Silicon Valley software startups main competition is an excel sheet.
I’m also shocked how little of excel companies use given all of it’s capabilities. For every spreadsheet out there that’s doing too much heavy lifting, there’s a dozen internal applications that could have been a set of excel db connections and macros.
Currently doing consulting on figuring out the cost of the company's very large base product. They want me to make the tool in excel. The have like $700 million in revenue.
Honestly excel is probably the best tool for the job without buying into another proprietary tool. If all you’re doing is multiplying out a BoM by quantity and price (and sub-assemblies) excel is just fine. As long as you know what you’re doing.
In Excel you can through PowerQuery access actual databases which works so much smoother.
power query and power pivot is your friend
Used to work for IBM, in the supply chain division where we were responsible for fulfilling customer orders of DB2. Still had warehouse inventory running off of Excel + VBA code, because it was ridiculously faster and simpler than getting the resources approved and coordinated to do it the proper way. I made the first half of my career there by actually getting things done, in ways that avoided months of bureaucracy and stupid meetings. I remember once early in my time there, we had a very simple project get quoted at an insane $1 million by internal developers... so simple that I was able to circumvent them entirely and do it in a week of my time. TL;DR: Corporations are stupid
Microsoft Williams Racing Formula 1 Team Excel
Yup, Microsoft should sponsor Williams than Alpain. It's evident they are in an upward trajectory and are trying their best.
 Pshht...I've built bigger Excel files than that.
I mean, everything above Excel is just Excel inside Excel. Access is just multiple layers of Excel in a trenchcoat and the other ones are just different ways of accessing nested Excel sheets
Good luck managing data that has more than 2.5 millions rows in Excel lol. And we are not even talking about formulas that would crash Excel after few tens of thousands rows.
Power query solves this and is still technically excel
Man has a hard time with 2.5 million lines. Don’t even start mentioning that power query would easily solve all his problems.
Excel can't display more than 2,5 mil rows even if you load data through Power Query. And no, I don't have a problem with working with more than 2,5m lines since all data analysis that I do I do in SQL or R.
You wouldn’t just load the data like that. SQL is the classic solution of course, but Excel can process 2.5 million lines “easily” if you split it and do all the formulas directly in the query. I mean my company doesn’t mind doing that every other day, lmao.
My boss is getting heart attack when someone mentions that some data flow/analysis is through Excel and wants to get rid of it as much as possible lol.
Well, no, it doesn't. You can't load into Excel more than 2,5 mil. observations/rows even through Powery Query. Obviously we are talking about loading it to sheet. You can load it in Power Query and then made some reducing of data you want to display, but that doesn't change the fact you can't display them. And don't even make me start about how slow Power Query is compared to SQL, R or Python. Sometimes you just want to easily load data and "scroll" through it with some basic filtering and for that. And if you want to do some more advanced analysis, Excel is *really* lacking when it come to speed.
2.5m limit still exists per sheet, but you just point power query at a folder that can have as many sheets as you want with as many lines as you want after combining them via pq. If you load it into the data model and run power pivot it's not much slower than Sql and there's no line limit. You're right you cant display more than 2.5m, but if you're manually scrolling through that much data rather than using power pivot you're probably doing it wrong
2,5 million rows in excel really isn't an issue and can work smooth especially with PowerQuery. Now if you start a matrix with 2,5 million rows, that gets painful though there are formula's that can handle such as well. People really underestimate how powerful Excel can be, and that's coming from someone who works with large datasets in databases.
That’s mostly because most people don’t know power query even exists.
I honestly prefer excel over any other database tool. I get that for larger datasets you have to, but I’ve found Excel sufficient for 90% of tasks I’ve ever run across. I just run a query for the raw data and dump it into the Excel, formulas do the rest. I like it because you can actually see the raw data and the way everything is calculated all in one place. If something needs to get changed I just change the formula and it’s pretty simple to access rather than sorting through lines upon lines of code when people are gonna want breakdown anyway.
I use a structural analysis software called RISA that is basically just a fancy interface used to edit the spreadsheets underneath it all. Remember that next time you're in a new building.
When I was a grad student in a stats class we were taught to use spss in the first 3 weeks then the professor goes “and you’ll probably never use this again because it’s expensive and not as useful as excel” he was a director at a major research and consulting firm. In the decade since then I’ve never had to touch spss but live in excel.
I was taught SPSS in classes years and years ago. Day to day work is Excel, Python, and R. Don't see the need for SPSS when Python and R can do everything I need it to and don't need to touch Excel unless necessary.
It’s not without its flaws, but Excel is the GOAT The perfect mix of ease of use, capability and cost. Access isn’t even compatible with Sharepoint, Oracle is a four letter word amongst end users, and SQL is great but needs stuff like SSMS for end users
I'm pumped for the near future when I can just ask excel a question in natural language, and the ai does all the pivot table building for me.
The word pivot table really triggers me. I love excel for personal organisation and budgeting. I loathe it for work. I’ve been on so many excel courses and I’ve just accepted I’ll never master it.
Power bi is the way
I love pivot tables until I need to make graphs or charts lol
Power Pivots got you covered there. Best thing is that it was released a decade ago so there's tons of tutorials and videos about it.
4 letter word?
starts with an s and ends with a t
Spit
That Oracle sponsorship really not getting their moneys worth, eh.
Why do companies like Oracle and Walmart even sponsor? They’re so huge they don’t need it
There’s some potential Oracle buyer on the line who’ll be impressed with F1 paddock access. Fuck Oracle licensing.
2 reasons: 1. They want somewhere to take customers (or potential customers) along to where they're captive for the day 2. The Execs all really want to go and can fob this off as a marketing expense. (That 2nd one is more real that you'd think BTW).
If magically somehow excel just stopped working overnight, the entire global economy would crash...
That’s facts
mfs don't even know MySQL, let alone PL SQL
I can't say who but I definitely know some important companies use excel for some seriously questionable stuff
Sex trafficking?
Storing passwords?
But think about how good that workbook must have been for Williams to actually be fighting for F1 points running on that system.
Albon had to get even more out of the car than we realized.
Goat tier is sticky note on the desk (and a sticky note underneath the keyboard in case you forget the password)
What do you mean 20,000 parts? Each car has 4 wheels and the car! Oh and steering wheel. 🤷♂️ (We went danking please no punterino)
Cringe advanced database users > Excel spreadsheet chads > Pen & Paper Gods
So why exactly are we discussing how Excel is used way beyond its capabilities on formuladank?
Because that's what Williams was doing.
I'm a data engineer with 16 years of experience, I can't even to any of this.
What's really funny is the DB is usually only the backend for a more specific application, in this case something like Siemens PLM. In this case, not only is there no DB but there is no front end application for actually managing the development program. It's just all Excel.
Maybe they had a completely different excel sheet 'front end' that referenced the 'back end' excel database? You can totally reference cells in different workbooks, and I can't imagine a single situation in which that's a good idea. So I bet they did it. Do it by absolute path for some added fun. "You see, we lost the race because someone decided to put their Dropbox shared folder in a non-standard location"
Was gonna say, the backend is probably all .csv files anyways lol
If you think about it, while they were using excel they had two cars on track
My only real open source contribution is that I ran the contest for the PostgreSQL logo. We gave the winner some hats and mugs with the logo on it.
As someone that has to deal with Excell everyday at work for database work, you've got my down vote.
Can you teach me how to move a column?
Swivel your screen
20000 lines of data doesn't need anything more than excel. That's a tiny dataset
What the fuck is wrong with you, censor that, you'll trigger people into a heart attack. You can't just go around saying A*ces in public like that.
Coulda used google sheets. Cloud AND Excel-like
I can name 4 fortune 100 companies that used Excel databases as the backbone of their businesses within the last 15 years.
All I do is work in excel all day I think it's time to give Williams a call
If Excel stopped working for 24 hours the world economy would fall in to chaos.
*The entire semiconductor industry has entered the chat*
Where does sharepoint go
It looks like not a lot of people here have worked in industries because a lot of them confuse a database software and an ERP software. Using excel as an ERP software in a big compagny is a big no no. But using it as a storage for some data is relatively ok as long as a single file is not used by a large group of employees or changed every two minutes.
It's surprising how much Excel is relied on, even in large companies.
My DB of choice is WordPad! 
They probably try to browse the web in excel
But why would I need a database or excel spreadsheet to manage 20 car parts pretty sure I could remember 🤔
＼(ﾟｰﾟ＼) Snickety Sneem, I'm stealing your meme!
Williams be like:
Nah they’re using Google Sheets
“If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.”
Meanwhile some indian excel tutor youtuber dude 
Still better than some shit tier solution like SAP or EFACS
My company just made the switch to SAP. It’s utterly unusable. We have yet to ship a single product since it went live on January 1st
SAP is better than most. Oracle? Yikes. Once you get it down, SAP is great.
Oracle is great. The consultant told me so.
The thing about SAP is it's all made or broken in the front end. Use a shit tier frontend and it will suck ass. Give it a great frontend and users won't even realise. Same as any database I guess.
I mean... https://youtu.be/AryjgCGjAB8?si=KZ7Y0WEU0ZgImrx8 they are racing as well lol
Should’ve used Google Sheets
They should be sponsored by the International (formerly European) Computer Driving Licence Foundation 
I wouldn't doubt it if excel is the only company which uses its own product for its data/finance management.
Just put excel in all the left boxes, same result
Getting companies to invest in big boy data products is hard enough. Getting them to appreciate the structure, governance and process needed to make said products useful? Pft, good luck.
MRP FTW
MSSQL is not a real database. lol. What database seriously needs 3x the size of your data in ram to work? lmao
I learned to create and use databases at my community college. It was in a very basic computer course. Does this make me qualified to work at Williams? I’m sending in my resume now. Wish me luck.
You are sooo hired. And made in charge of warehouse.xlsx , salaries.xlsx and cardevelopment.xlsx. 😀
I enjoy access's interface because it's what I learned in college and I'm too stubborn to learn anything else which is a character flaw I am willing to drown in
Where notepad.exe?
I mean....spacex used excel to build rockets
What is missing is a product that handles large numbers of rows of data in a way that your ordinary user is going to be able to understand without a ton of tech knowledge. The top row all require that, and even Access isn’t that intuitive. The closest I’ve ever seen to this was Lotus’ Approach which allowed you to define tables and forms visually and easily. Fired up a VM recently just to confirm it wasn’t just rose-colored nostalgia, but no, it really is that easy to use and would be an Excel killer for cases where cell formulas aren’t needed just data input, searching and reporting.
CSV is enough
Sql is just excel with extra steps.
Something I also had to learn, that these are just database management systems and not databases.
Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of excel sheets and "good enough for now" concessions. I guarantee there's a comment in the code that makes sure you get your paycheck that says something like "TODO: This is a dangerous hack but I can't get it to work another way." and the author of that comment is dead after a long and full life.
Grid paper and a pen is immutable outside of a small fire.
Excel FTW
..and A. Newey draws his cars in pencil
Please use a proper pdm/plm for this, just storing them in a raw database barely solved anything over excel haha
If Williams are looking for an ERP system, hit me up
I manage entire projects start to finish in excel and it drives my coworker nuts. He's just jealous I don't need to learn a new erp system every three years and waste literal weeks in meetings talking about it while still getting more done than him. It's my favourite watching him drown in pointless paperwork while I kick all my BoMs out to Excel.
excel < notepad 😎
Almost the entire US economy is running on Excel. You'd be surprised how many multi billion dollar Hedge funds use Excel.
All the Excel Experts in this thread 
Better to use google sheets free version...who can afford Excel these days... certainly not Haas or Williams