Comment by Fwirt
10 hours ago
The question is, do the same firms ban Excel? Excel spreadsheets often end up as shadow databases in unlikely places.
10 hours ago
The question is, do the same firms ban Excel? Excel spreadsheets often end up as shadow databases in unlikely places.
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.
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.
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
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.
Excel is made for calculations. But if you make it hard to make a DB, people will abuse Excel as a DB.
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.
or reimplement excel with sqlite as a backend :-D
BTW sqlite can run SQL queries on CSV files with relatively simple one-liner command...
and excel has gui for forms
Only where VBA is available. Not available for MacOs versions if I'm correct?
IMO, almost any Excel more than a month old should become readonly.
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.
So you're saying they should further auto-delete after two or three months?
2 replies →
They generally cannot. But they do banish Access.
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)
Excel is also a shared DB: it has supported multiple concurrent users accessing and modifying the same spreadsheet for decades.
Do companies ban text files? Text files are used to store data.
That's why you store them in unsaved tabs instead.
Do companies ban data centers? It's crazy to send PII to other computers on the line.
Do companies ban brains? Brains are used to store data.