1y ago

it always interesting when multi billion dollar company's costing system is a 63 tab excel 97 spreadsheet at it's core...

169 comments

It will live in a folder with:
Spreadsheet(1).xls Spreadsheet - shortcut.lnk Spreadsheet(2) - Copy.xls New Spreadsheet - DO NOT USE.xls
- I have colleagues who have 20 copies of the same document with slight variations named like this in a folder. I honestly don't understand how they function at work.
  
  Sort by last modified
  
  I work in Finance at my company and we always save revised copies for Excel files instead of saving over.
  But we also have strict rules on it. File name is always "xxxx_Workbook Template Name_MMDDYY.xlsx" or "_YYYY_MM.xlsx", depending on how often it gets updated.
  Older versions get moved to a subfolder. It helps us go back and find out what something was if there was a mistake or revert back if Excel done fucks up.
  
  That's just version control but worse!
  
  Could be they don't.
  
  Every tech noob user I see. Worse if it's mac because 1) I cannot use it for the life of me and 2) almost every Mac user stores it in the same default downloads folder and won't know what path it's in unless they use the Finder tool.
  
  It probably makes sense to them. I'm sure they're looking at your git workflow wondering how you function!

IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won't as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
- Whew, glad you didn't say it wasn't a password manager...
  
  My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding...
- I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.
  Spreadsheets don't require a UI to be built. People don't have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.
  I'm an IT guy too and I'm the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya....might as well just use spreadsheets.
- Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
  Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
- The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
  Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
  
  It's more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
  
  MS Access is a thing...
  
  Power Platform with dataverse is essentially this
- Its not that simple.
  Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
  But, generally, people know it is a horrible workflow and is prone to failure. But there is no time and resources available to revamp the entire system. Because that likely involves going "offline" for the migration as well as the subsequent retraining. Its no different than the technical debt we all laugh and cry about. We know that server is held together with chewing gum and shoe strings but we don't have time or authorization to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. We are just hoping it doesn't fail at a bad time.
  If you're lucky? You can periodically export the excel sheet to a database (sql or access, it doesn't matter). You are still doing things wrong but you at least have a recovery option at that point. But, if you can't, you are more or less fucked and know it.
  As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
- Shit, I'll mock them. I'm too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I'll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I'm a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
  
  Dudes rock
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Nick Burns
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- It's great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn't see this on the "not a..." list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!
  
  I love the idea of xls applications, that's really evil!
- Correct, it's for tracking work items.
- You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
- It's not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I'll reject that shit without reading it and type "lmaoooooooo..." To the review character limit.
  My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
  
  It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn't make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.

- They said inappropriate.

The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me...
- Sometimes it's okay to fire a client.
  
  Like... into the sun with an oversized circus cannon?
  
  Some of my clients I'd like to actually set on fire
- That's... a normal usecase? Importing exporting excel files?
  
  Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
  
  It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
- What's the use case?
  Like for anything financial, Excel files are preferable.
  Although I will say this. Companies are lying when they say they want Excel exports. They don't. They want CSV but they don't know the difference.

ITT, very salty IT guys... I'd rather folks use Excel then some home made stuff. That's the real nightmare fuel. VB, not .net, just VB, from 1995. You'll beg to have bad Excel after you deal with that stuff. 😵😱😭
- The scripting in Excel is VBA, which is VB6. So, basically what I'm saying is that you can have both!
  
  In .xls .. no thanks
- My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
  I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
  
  My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn't even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
- The software my company makes still uses VB5 for the front end 🙃
  
  🍻🫗

Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps to deliver rapid feature turnaround to customers, generating a million dollars in revenue:
Our finance department, tracking that revenue in a 700MB excel spreadsheet which is version controlled by a 13 year old email thread:
- wtf are ipynb apps?
  
  It's when you have Python and breakfast.
  
  If you have to ask, you can't afford it
  Edit - it seems y'all should save up for a sense of humor anyway
- How in the world does that spreadsheet even open?

what do you mean, Excel isn't a Database?
- It is according to UK's National Health Service: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
  I love this part: "To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap."
  
  There is an ODBC driver for Excel. Not to put data into Excel -- To get it back out, treating it as if it were a database.
  This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.

At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she "accidentally" sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone's wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
Don't know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
Everyone was pissed lol
- Everyone was pissed
  as someone who had worked in transparent jurisdictions: everyone should absolutely be pissed about not having this info available publicly always in real time.
  
  One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that "well it's too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal."
  
  It was the way the information was presented, plus it made everyone realize that there was a pretty huge gap in several people's salaries, even those in the same job (ie, one engineer made 50k while another made 70k, doing the same job). I agree though, employees should not be punished for discussing pay.
- It shouldn't matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don't realize their value.
  In fact, it's illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
  As a government employee - everyone's wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
  
  A friend who is senior by two years found out that a new hiree was getting paid more than he does for the exact same role. Understandably, he was pissed and left.
- Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
  
  I wouldn't call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees' tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn't prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
- Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc... And it got "got" by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly...
  
  Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe. Ransomware blocks the company's access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn't stolen, it's just unusable
- I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
  She didn't remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
  The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
  
  Good, thats what sick time is for...
- Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.
- HR says salary info is confidential.
  HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
  HR commited the very same offence
  And gets away with it.

My dad asked if I could look at a spreadsheet he uses at work, maybe fix a couple of things that he has to manually adjust. This meme is frightfully accurate, the earliest parts of this thing are older than some of the junior devs on my team.

On one of my last jobs they required us to do a straightforward but time consuming task with excel, it was ideal to automate it in software but my manager won't ask the dev team because he said it would be very expensive and they were focused on more important things. I did it with macros on excel and word and kept it to me and my coworker, so we had like two hours of free time everyday, only had to look like we were busy with the sheet.
- It's unfortunate when they are short sighted like this. They would rather have 8 people do the work over a week that 1 could do in a day with the right fix.
  However often there is rarely the resources or the people with the vision in the right role to push for these solutions.

My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)

Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
- And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
  
  My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
- Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
  It was 50-50 relief vs panic

Didn't the UK's covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel

"Here's the sign up sheet for the Holiday meal!"
.xls
- And you only get a work phone to edit that file.

I love Excel! The best part of my job is where I get to use Excel. The worst parts are where I have to use power point or interact with other people. Sadly, most of time is spent on PPT and interacting these days. :(
- Nah, the worst part is when I have to watch someone else use Excel.
  YOU DON'T NEED TO RIGHT CLICK AND SELECT COPY. YOU CAN JUST PRESS CTRL+C.
  And virtually none of them know how to paste values, so all the templates end up messed up.
  
  True, watching other people use Excel is painful. I used to have a coworker that was so good at Excel that she didn't use a mouse at all and was way quicker than anyone else. She made me feel guilty whenever I was the one being watched because I knew she must be frustrated watching me do things with shortcuts and the mouse.
  
  Not Excel, just general computer usage- my daughter refuses to Control-C and Control-V and right clicks instead and it drives me nuts.
- I am about to scream at the number of people who use Google Slides as a method to document policy.

When I was in high-school I made an inventory management/pos for my school's merch shop in excel and vbs. It was the single worst thing I have ever made and how I discovered what feature creep was. Got me a course credit though!

I am guilty of this. I have a set of fucking ghastly macros that do monthly number crunching for me. Currently moving it all into SQLite and R.

I saw a presentation in excel once, I want sum it up here, but it was pointless.

My job where we run a bunch of programs that are actually VB style interfaces with an excel backend loading data from a huge database... Opening the two that we need for everyday tasks uses 10gigs of ram....

Guys, what is excel? Do you mean libre office calc?
- I think its some gui version of numpy arrays...
- That but in good

Excel is a database, application/program with Microsoft forms, notepad, calculation tool, calculation report, sometimes used to make rudimentary sketches when PowerPoint is not convenient.
Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it! ¯(ツ)/¯
- If they did care and tried to improve it, they'd ruin it.
  
  Fair point
- Imagine if Microsoft gave a shit and actually improved it!
  Excel is one of the few apps MS actually cares about and improves. It's the reason you can't replace it with Google Sheets. I've tried. You can't even print mailing labels from Google sheets/docs without renting a plugin that charges a monthly fee. Printing mailing labels has been in Excel for 30 years.
  Every behind the scenes (functions/features) change to Excel has been brilliant. Unfortunately every UI change to Excel has been awful.

I still can't get over the fact that it was only a few weeks ago when I learned that Walter White is the same actor who played dad in Malcolm in the Middle. still blows my mind. What a prolific actor to take on such vastly different roles.
I zoom in on Walter White and try so hard to see Hal Wilkerson in there but I just can't.
- You know.... If that is true, it's possible you may suffer from face blindness
  My wife grew up with it her whole life and didn't realize it was abnormal until she was about 30. Apparently it's more common than you'd think, and if washer most people have no idea it even exists, even if they have it.
- There is a skit from Sat Night Live with Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul that is a spoof of their real lives as celebrities. Up to a point he is mild mannered, and then suddenly he gets very dark and serious. He is really good at portraying an aloof person and turning it on a dime. Point is in the that skit you certainly can see both.

Okay let me ask the question:
"You know, the company is getting a bit too big and heavy to keep all our books in Excel." What is there to go to beyond that? Lease an IBM AS/400, hire a team of COBOL programmers and have them build a bespoke system for you? Something Something SQL?
Back when I was going to school, every single one of us got one semester in middle school and one semester in high school on MS Office. That was 20 years ago. There's two, two-and-a-half generations of us who are trained to use Excel as the most computing we can do, like if you need a computer to do math you use the calculator app or Excel. If you need to compute more than Excel can, you hire an IT team and a database administrator and such.
- Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don't have experience personally with that program, I've heard it's miles better for that type of work than excel
  
  Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it's definitely better in that regard than Excel.
  But of course it also has it's limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I've definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
  
  Government runs on Access.

If I had a nickel for every utility I worked with that handles billing of capital projects on a spreadsheet, I'd have 2... Which isn't a lot, but still odd that the backbone of their billing is excel

Knitting pattern design

Image Transcription: Meme
Me if I had a dollar for every inappropriate use of Excel I've seen
[An image of a storage room, which contains a giant rectangle made of cash. There are two people standing near it]

Tell you something: I would have even more money for any instance where people used Lotus Notes for things it was never designed for. I would bet that this is the one program with the least applications that are actually working along the original design features.
And then people claim that Notes is a shitty program, because it was used in a way it was never ever built for (and the manual telling one that this is not a good idea).

Hey! I have you know the corporation I work for has an enterprise database system from 2002 with two whole maintainers.
- Is it worse than intersystems ...?

At least they aren't trying to use Powerpoint for computation....
https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Not necessarily disagreeing here, but what are you talking about
- From the sounds of it, the company's entire accounting system is done in a very old version of Excel. One Excel spreadsheet. Which is a very bad idea for so many reasons. If it's not backed up and gets deleted or corrupted.... everything is gone. Not to mention that there's so many better ways to do your main accounting than Excel. Excel has it's uses, just not....that.
  
  Excellent, yes it was a company that spent multiple millions on SAP and everything went back to multiple versions of these excel spreadsheets the accountants maintained that contained all the costing, time, and labour rates. They also generated code to inject new SKUs into SAP. It seemed pretty fragile to me.
- Excel has one purpose, data analytics, but as it is a very powerful tool in that regard, with loads of flexible features, people tend to use it in ways that will work for a surprisingly long time, before completely failing.
  A common example is to build a database in Excel, say a product catalog with all features and pricing listen in dynamic fields, then someone writes a custom macro to interface the database with external systems, and as new employees join more code is written to make the database easier to update and edit, then more systems are brought in to interface with the database, more data is added, say materials needed in production to build said products, and time calculations to findout how long the different products will take to make, and what product you can make with what you have in inventory, and more macros and integrations.
  And it keeps going, but Excel has a hard limit on how much data a sheet can contain, and with all of the new features and integrations it will just be a matter of time untill a new update from Microsoft breaks critical functionallity.
  And as the Excel database is used for more and more stuff, it becommes more and more dangerous to the company, at the end you will have an unmaintainable mess that is kept alive on a Windows XP VM running MS Office 2003, since that is the latest system that can run the database with all integrations
  A proper SQL database is far more efficient robust, and customizable, but require more indepth knowledge about programming.
  
  Step 1: load xls
  Step 2: Save as csv
  Step 3: ???
  step 4: profit
  
  True, but unless still using .xls instead of .xlsx chances of reaching the row limit on a sheet became rather small, even for very large companies. Many issues with the everything in excel hell, but the row limit isn't a main one (anymore).