What's the worst thing you've seen Excel used for?
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Creative solutions....
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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
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The dude was too cheap to buy paint and brushes, to do what he loves. It kind of is a comical tragedy
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In my case, it would be blank.
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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.
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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.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I
Matt Parker uses Excel to demonstrate how subpixels/images are generated.
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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.
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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.
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LMAO
I love the transparency, but yikes.
I bet someone said "We can protect this information by making the text of the salaries white!"
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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
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Creative solution
I'm still trying to figure out what he was trying to solve, lmao
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Ahaha, what was he even trying to do? What was the purpose of that Excel sheet?
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The Excel wizards always impress me.
But now I want to see what happens when the equivalent of a caveman finds a magic artifact and creates some sort of precarious magic monkey paw solution, haha
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Lmao...
The client needs it as a table. Excel does tables, so this is the best way.
Maybe they even locked the cells to prevent downloading the images (but not screenshots lol)? (I'm trying to be generous here)
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Yeouch. How long ago was this? It feels like the standards for even junior devs have gone way up.
...but I guess even the C-students must find jobs eventually...?
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Oh dear...
I don't even understand how that would get past even the first couple of people using it. I imagine the idea was that they'd copy/paste the value into the password field. But did nobody ever paste the password into somewhere other than a password field and realize, "Hey, I can see this password!"...even accidentally?
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No idea - all I remember is my dad almost crying with laughter as he told me about it
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2024 lol. Maybe senior dev is an overstatement, he was just more senior than me. He also left a database where the main table had one varchar, freetext column that users wrote multiple fields into because it was a 'simpler user experience' . Was a pain to extract all those fields with regex...
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Thats more work than it's worth. Just black out the cells instead.
