I'm in the database camp but I can see the use case for spreadsheets.

I'm in the database camp but I can see the use case for spreadsheets. The big problem is unless you are very disciplined it is easy for a large spreadsheet to become unmaintanable. I've come across this a lot when I've been approached by people in my work place asking me to automate a spreadsheet for them. Inevitably someone will insert, delete or just move a column around and the whole fragile mess will come crashing down. I've found when someone comes to me and says "I spend X amount of time every morning updating this spreadsheet can you automate it for me." The answer is almost always to migrate to a database. Spreadsheets also seems to encourage people to lazily paste data in without much thought. I've seen some real nightmares - spreadsheets that are 100's of mb in size and contain almost a complete copy of portions of the company's database inside them, which take minutes to open and load. Pasting data has some other disadvantages as well over time minor changes sneak in due to the mutable nature of cells in excel. Which leads to phone calls like "Can you check the figures for last FY Mike our Accountant is telling me X while Bill our Engineer is convinced it should be Y" eventually you find out Mike is getting his data out of a giant spreadsheet and one of the cells has 'inadvertantly' been modified so it no longer agrees with the source database. Eventually you learn to head off phone calls like this with "The number in the database is correct if you sourced it from anywhere else its likely to be wrong." But still frustrating to deal with.

Posted by bigger_cheese on Jun 2, 2015, 11:27 PM

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• reliability (Marketing)

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