I don't care how big your nail is, Excel is not a hammer!

[jon787.livejournal.com]

I told you that Excel was not the right tool for the job. I even offered to do it the right way using Access. Two months and 14,000 entries later is not the best time to come whining to me about your 'database'. You do not have a database you have a large collection of spreadsheets. Calling this mess a database is an insult to databases.

Comments

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Gah. I had someone insisting on exporting just some of her contacts in Outlook to Excel. Could not be in any other format. And no, she did not want her entire contact list exported. Ended up with her getting pissed at the fact I didn't know the apps inside and out. Hey, the losers in the MS queue let your call roll over to general, where I was jumping in as we were being swamped.

/Mac queue has least number of hang ups and best response time. Go me!

[jecook]

14,000 lines?

::picks jaw up from floor::

and I thought the 20+ MB excell 'sheets that my current place's finance department handles on a daily basis was large...

[jon787.livejournal.com]

When I worked at my college I had a user who hit the 65,536 row limit.

[azurelunatic]

Fuck. I feel your pain. Had to attempt to use a series of spreadsheets not quite that bad but still painful. The creator did not want it in access because she could not color the columns.

[tecie.livejournal.com]

A) Been there --Heard every excuse in the book, including that C*O's can't comprehend msaccess, which I responded is why you write vba applets to handle it.
B) MSAccess is an insult to databases.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

+1

[sheryls.livejournal.com]

you should tell the mto make it the back end of a web page, and make an ODBC connection to it (http://www.crystalsoftware.com.au/datapipe/excel_odbc.html) - then make sure it's on a production server somewhere getting thousands of hits a day! YAY!! :D *stabby*

[residentgeek.livejournal.com]

I have the opposite problem.

A group of secretaries has decided they need a database to keep track of their student info. Of course, they did it in Access, without consulting anyone in the IT department (it's not our job to make Access databases anyway). It has about 10 data items per student, and about 60 students total. But it has no linked tables, no data entry forms (they enter data directly on the table), no queries... it's basically a glorified Excel spreadsheet. And when they added a table for the evening class, they created a whole new database instead of just creating a new table in the existing one. Every semester, they just create an entirely new database for each incoming class.

They even tried to name the columns by typing the headers into the first row, and couldn't understand why that row moved when they tried to alphabetize the list. *sigh*

[network-nerd.livejournal.com]

I bet the admin system can dump them an extract every term, in consistent format, if they were to just ASK....

[jjjiii]

Every time I suggest building a database for something someone has already started in Excel, I get told that we can't because we "don't have time" to adequately plan the database structure. My supervisor is an experienced SQL DBA who generally knows what she's talking about, but when it comes to shoehorning Excel to store essentially large tables of data that is NOT being used for MATH-type operations, our group just loves using the wrong tool for the job.

OMG!

[ebtb.livejournal.com]

I think I used to work for this person. I referred to them as the President of the I <3 Excel Fan Club! He wanted all of his sales/customer information to be stored in excel and then wanted me to create reports. I told him that Access would be way better than that so I cold weed out people by state, product, last purchase, etc. but NOOOO HE didn't know how to use Access. Well, he didn't have to. I never once saw him touch a computer the 3 1/2 years I was there, so why is this a problem now???? I had to explain to him that Excel is finite. Grrrrrrrrrr.