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by Fwirt10 hours ago |
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upvoteby croon3 hours ago|
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This might catch flak, but generalizing I would assume that the people banning things are the same people who would use excel for something where a database would be better, and if so, that is the reason Excel isn't banned on the same conditionals that would get sqlite banned.
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upvoteby hermitShell10 hours ago|
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The sane thing would be to ban Excel and promote SQLite. Excel is often used for tabulated text (issue tracking) not calculations. Perfect use case for a relational db
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upvoteby frollogaston10 hours ago|
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Excel is made for calculations. But if you make it hard to make a DB, people will abuse Excel as a DB.
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upvoteby TJSomething7 hours ago|
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I mean, it might have been at first, but Microsoft figured out that the majority of users for lists without formulas in 1993 and they've strategized around that. IMHO, the biggest concession to this was when they added Power Query to core Excel in 2016.
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upvoteby rswail5 hours ago|
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Excel has sheets for tables, columns and rows, primary keys (UNIQUE), foreign key references etc if you squint.

It doesn't require you use all of that properly, but it's there.

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upvoteby harvie4 hours ago|
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or reimplement excel with sqlite as a backend :-D

BTW sqlite can run SQL queries on CSV files with relatively simple one-liner command...

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upvoteby 0123456789ABCDE5 hours ago|
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and excel has gui for forms
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upvoteby rantingdemon4 hours ago|
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Only where VBA is available. Not available for MacOs versions if I'm correct?
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upvoteby nereye13 minutes ago|
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VBA is just there for backward compatibility.

The modern alternative is to use JavaScript/TypeScript, which makes such solutions cross platform (including MacOs, web etc.):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overvie...

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upvoteby mr_toad2 hours ago|
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I’ve worked at some organisations that have strict rules (not always strictly followed) about what can go in Excel spreadsheets, and where they have to be stored. The C drive is verboten. Some also have standards about classification and labelling of PII and sensitive data.
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upvoteby silon427 hours ago|
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IMO, almost any Excel more than a month old should become readonly.
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upvoteby irishcoffee2 hours ago|
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You should consider knock-on effects of this brilliant idea. Now there would be copies of spreadsheets younger than a month that get replicated 47 billion times, exponentially compounding the problem you're trying to solve.

This sounds like how we pass so many stupid laws. Nobody thinks about 2nd order effects.

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upvoteby perching_aix1 hours ago|
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So you're saying they should further auto-delete after two or three months?
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upvoteby irishcoffee1 hours ago|
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3rd order effect, people copy and paste the old sheet into a new sheet, now we have worse exponential. You’re not very good at this huh.
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upvoteby perching_aix1 hours ago|
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Which is very annoying and people will complain. People complaining can be then directed towards a better solution. As a bonus, mistakes will also rise, leading to further complaints, especially ones that reach higher. All this making the dogshit practice, and the idiots committing them, infinitely more visible and thus fixable.

The sheer volume of data that needs tending to may even grind certain departments to a halt! What a great opportunity! It'd appear I'm positively stellar at this!

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upvoteby Spooky2310 hours ago|
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They generally cannot. But they do banish Access.
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upvoteby pasc18786 hours ago|
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Now that is different.

Access gets used for a shared DB and that is quite easy to corrupt. It is much more cost effective to have that in a proper central database (I supse SQLLite is better here as well)

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upvoteby cwillu3 hours ago|
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Excel is also a shared DB: it has supported multiple concurrent users accessing and modifying the same spreadsheet for decades.
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upvoteby 8 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby DeathArrow8 hours ago|
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Do companies ban text files? Text files are used to store data.
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upvoteby perching_aix1 hours ago|
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That's why you store them in unsaved tabs instead.
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upvoteby yard20105 hours ago|
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Do companies ban data centers? It's crazy to send PII to other computers on the line.
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upvoteby altmanaltman5 hours ago|
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Do companies ban brains? Brains are used to store data.
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