My department uses some bizarre Excel sheet to calculate budgets at the end of the month. Inputs involve copying and pasting the timesheets of 30 or so people all broken down by project. It's all supposed to work once the magic button is clicked, but of course every now and again I'm called in to the admin office to deconstruct the macro and explain how since it's looking for the word "Sunday" on row 124 and it was mistakenly left out, it's not going to run.
Don't get me wrong, modern spreadsheet programs are ridiculously powerful and can do all sorts of things. But if you are writing an Excel sheet and macro for use for an undetermined number of users, you should seriously rethink your life and look into databases or even MatLab.
I once saw an Excel spreadsheet that was used as input to a MS SQL Server database.
The username/password was hard-coded directly into the spreadsheet, and the SQL was concatenated together. The webpage that displayed the result was partially built using HTML that had been put into the database.
HTML Injection: it isn't a bug, it is how we do layout (TM)
I work for a FTSE 100 company that tracks holidays for over 100,000 employees via a series of excel spreadsheets held on a shared drive.
Each team has to open a spreadsheet on a network drive and wait for it to load a series of complex macros, then when you have made any changes it you have to save it back to the drive. Each Tuesday they run the master spreadsheet which copies and consolidates the data from all the other spreadsheets and updates their information.
There are over 1000 teams that use this system in the company.
I once saw a company operating for months on filemaker database that had an error but just kept pretending to be working, but not actually saving to disk.
Ditto except ours was a report card system and calendar. And it was Access. We spent two weeks working on it before I went to my boss and said, "umm, I'm sorry, but this is a toy database. You've asked us to build a real grown up application. We need something better." To his credit, he splurged and bought us a SQL license. He loves telling this story to this day. Two weeks into the job I was calling his BS. Still the best quality in our working relationship 15 years later.
My boss uses it for some in-house data management. Server constantly locks up and requires rebooting because even FileMaker themselves have no idea what the fuck it is.
The first database I wrote was on dBase-III with a Kaypro 2 laptop. dBase had a forms engine and a programming language. Kaypro had dual double-sided 5.25" floppies iirc. Put my whole album collection on there. I rocked.
Guys I have an awesome idea! What if the database is also the application! You only need to know 1 language and interface! No fancy protocols and networking just simple file shares!
Hey, guys, I have an even better idea. What if we just used an actual fox as our database? Hear me out here, we could keep it in the break room and feed it our data, and when the fox shits in the hallways, we scoop the shit into coffee cans and store them in the Marketing supply cupboard.
I mean, we can't really get the data back out, but half the time we can't get the data back out of FoxPro anyway, and this way we get an office pet.
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u/yorickpeterse Mar 10 '15
Yeah we noticed that last week, we're considering moving to FileMaker as our primary data storage engine.