What's the worst thing you've seen Excel used for?
-
That sounds like watching people play Jenga with railroad ties.
-
Judgment is God's purview. I just arrange the meeting.
Honestly, if it worked well for you and all the other affected stakeholders, I think that's what matters most.
-
i was unfortunately responsible for this one...
we developed a wireless communication protocol which was specified in an excel sheet, and it fell on us devs to implement the message types specified in the sheet. however since the specification kept changing we had to constantly update the message types in our tests to make sure they conformed. so i said "fuck it" and built a program that allowed me to "import" an excel file in a python program, which exposed all messages as classes that could be instantiated with automatic unit conversions. just drop the excel file of the day in the right place and run the test suite.
anyway that's how the excel sheet became the formal API definition
-
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
The tracing of Covid in the UK (specifically England) was collected in .xls files
-
I remember a story my dad told me about a guy at his work who didn't really know how to use Excel, and so had dragged the cell and column spacing out in order to have one huge cell, in which he typed all of his calculations - which he did manually with a calculator before typing them all longhand into his giant cell
-
Creative solution
-
Biologists love excel, and it makes sense why - the sheer convenience of copying and pasting across datapoints.
-
Creative solutions....
-
That whole video was needlessly upbeat paired with the mildly depressing things he was saying.
You know those Give Aid charity pleas you see on TV with the sad music? Imagine that but with upbeat techno music instead
-
The dude was too cheap to buy paint and brushes, to do what he loves. It kind of is a comical tragedy
-
In my case, it would be blank.
-
An oil company which had an MS access DB and a form configured for it with no checks for formatting that would insert the fields of the form directly into the database, and then if they wanted to make a change, they would export the entire database as csv, open it in excel, make changes and use that to overwrite the entire database.
This had been going on since some time in the 1990's. They finally wanted to move to a modernized databasing/operations solution which is what my company does.
I successfully cleaned 75% of that data, however it took 37 regular expressions and a script that was about 800 lines to account for every possible mis-entry, incorrect format, and merging fields if they were empty from newest records to oldest records until the fields were no longer empty where possible (essentially collapsing the records together to get as much data on each unique object which may have had 110 records over time through the database).
It is UN-BELIEVABLE what actual businesses get away with.
-
A government case management system with thousands of citizens data along with their citizens numbers next to their full address, used for active cases relating to people and their money. This spreadsheet was on the desktop of a coworker and that coworker only.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I
Matt Parker uses Excel to demonstrate how subpixels/images are generated.
-
It started its life as a tool to track the contents of promotional SKU's, but different stakeholders kept adding increasingly complicated logic until the whole thing depended on huge array formulas and VBA, and a recalculation took 1, then 2, then 5, then 15, then 30 minutes on a laptop, at which point we abandoned the whole thing and everyone went back to keeping track of their own piece manually.
-
My company uses excel for costing proposals (not crazy). In order to accurately cost, they decided to include everyone's salaries. I was all for it because the transparency helps keep everyone fairly compensated, but some were less enthused. Sadly gone now.
-
LMAO
I love the transparency, but yikes.
I bet someone said "We can protect this information by making the text of the salaries white!"
-
lmao
Everyone has some great ideas, and everyone needs to put their ideas in the same spot. And everyone needs those complex formulas right in there...lol
-
Creative solution
I'm still trying to figure out what he was trying to solve, lmao
-
Ahaha, what was he even trying to do? What was the purpose of that Excel sheet?
