What's the worst thing you've seen Excel used for?
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Company schedule entirely written in Google Sheets. When I originally took the position over, the owner wouldn’t settle for an alternative solution.
The previous IT person worked there previously for about 10 years and had been compulsively adding features with AppScript the entire time. It was auto sending emails, handling inventory, maintaining project files, you name it. I briefly looked at how it worked and there were easily a dozen script files, a few of which were thousands of lines.
I was able to replicate most of the important parts of the system that he wanted to replicate in about two weeks in between other work with one script file and something like 50 lines.
I eventually left for reasons unrelated to the place and only ever had to fix issues once every 6 months or so, which I consider pretty decent for an unattended Google Sheet shared by 5 users.
I’ve since returned and rebuilt the schedule a second time with a proper database and the whole thing run 10x smoother and more reliably.
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Someone once commented about a regional ISP with a customer base about five figures in size. Did they use a database system to track customer billing? Nope. All the customers and their billing info are on one spreadsheet. Billing customers means manually crawling through the spreadsheet and typing up the bill.
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is this a UK isp?
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Oh lord, it's hilarious that when I searched 'Gantt Chart' to learn what it was, the second or third link was to excel templates for it.
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A Google Sheet used as a password manager that every employee had access to. To keep it “secure” the cells with the passwords were hidden by changing the background color to match the text color.
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There's the guy who built a roller coaster . https://youtu.be/yYaLQ3LazYM
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In two different companies I've seen people refer to "the database" when they actually mean a spreadsheet. That's not just a terminology mixup, these things were super complex, with pseudo-relational tables, lookups, links to other files etc. The sort of thing that should be in an actual database, that has less chance of breaking in obscure ways when someone inserts a row or types a value over a formula. It was actually pretty impressive, in an "impending doom at any moment" kind of way.
Also had one where there was a spreadsheet of everyone in the business top to bottom, shared by HR and IT. Both groups needed a list of staff, so why not just keep one, right? This thing had personal details like home address and medical conditions, plus things like salary (inc garnishments), performance management notes etc, as well as of course their username and password (which was assigned to them and they couldn't change) and security questions and answers. It didn't even have a password on the file. I noped tf out of that place as quickly as I could, but for reasons even worse than that stupid spreadsheet.
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Holy crap
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Sex tracker... So many empty sheets...
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A CRM for a large client. A VERY large client.
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Company-internal service where the users would write their desired configuration into an Excel file. Then they push that into a Git repo, which triggers a deployment of the service with the configuration read from all the Excel files.
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OP asked for the worst thing you’ve seen Excel used for…
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To send images for graphic design.
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Ahem In my defense, the way I did it wasn't totally terrible. The dates are all gathered from other sheets, the chart is generated automatically with conditional formatting, and it's locked so there's no moving of cells or changing the colour manually. Don't hate me.
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Let me blow your mind a bit more...
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Not exactly what you’re looking for, but how about a flight simulator?
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Lmao. I once had a senior dev put database passwords into documentation, and then was about to email those out to interview candidates with the passwords 'blacked' out. I caught it quick enough before it could be sent thankfully.
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That sounds like watching people play Jenga with railroad ties.
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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.
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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
