this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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I like how there seems to be more and more alternatives to MS Office, even from big companies like Google. Best case scenario, this could lead to companies actually starting to use an open format, like ODF, so that all these different office applications can be used without causing issues in the file and that would pave the way for open source alternatives, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, to become viable alternatives for a lot more people and companies. Do Google Docs and Proton Drive use/support ODF? I'm pretty sure MS Office supports it.
I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death
Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked
Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it's being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it
More commonly, I've had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It's just hell.
Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.
You use what ya got, and you don't buy database software or hire a database guy until you know you need one
But access comes with office, so if you have excel you have at least a software that is intended to be used as a DB (efficacy aside)
Let's be real, using Excel as a makeshift database is probably still better than actually using Access lol
When I started studying IT at a Berufskolleg (German word, literal transaltion would be something like job college or job school), we started learning about databases by using Access. We were all so happy when we were done with that and just used SQL. I fucking hate Access.
The only use case I can see for Access is when you absolutely must have a database and your company will not provide you a real database solution. I have experience with both, but haven't touched Access in years (and hope to never do so again). To be fair, I also regularly use Excel for things that I should probably be using Word for because it is easier to get formatting right in Excel.
Have you ever tried just using Markdown?
And you've never heard of sqlite
Probably true for most companies but I worked at one that had plenty of DB servers and developers, even developed their own database tech. Still, Excelitis as we called it was rampant.
Nothings more permanent than a temporary solution.
It can also link nicely over odbc to full databases which are represented a nice tables...with links between sheets...waiiit a second.