this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Excel is great.
It does so much that people make it do what it shouldn't, and never think to explore technologies beyond it... Like a proper fucking database.
Then you get garbage business systems based on fragile excel sheets with bonkers macros and weird ETL pipelines to sync things.
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.
Or anything that looks like dates.
Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and 'helpfully' convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).
It's bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.
Reminds me of my last job where I had to build a ridiculously complex excel spreadsheet that I copied a bunch of reports into to do scheduling because someone decided I didn't need access to the actual data...