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
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
My rule of thumb when Excel is still just fine:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Jesus guys just hire a dba and go to SQL already.
You need to put a ! Before the [ so your image displays correctly and the [] should be empty
![]https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png
Oh fuckit.
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)
2013 is generous.
2007 is where it’s at
Its also a functional programming language!
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.
A functional reactive programming language no less.
I was using Excel to look at transaction records right before seeing this meme
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().
Everything I do in pandas gets exported to JSON. That way I can read it in my favorite editor, notepad.
This reminded me of the time during Covid where the UK covid information for patients was stored in Excel.
Didn’t turn out well for them
You would be honestly very uncomfortable if you knew how much sensitive information is stored on the desktop of someone as an excel spreadsheet.
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.
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.
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.
