It's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to tools they need to automate their work.
I can only imagine the thousands of lines of code I saved by using Excel '97 for a scientific tabular calculation effort alone.
Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway.
And it was on my mind the whole time.
It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than the DOC files they had been wanting, which were reasonable facsimiles of the top linen typewritten paperwork I used to fax then mail by USPS or Fedex at the beginning. With the original invoice attached using a "gold" paperclip, nothing ever stapled or folded.
Oh how low I have sunk since then :\
Anyway it was pretty easy to switch from Word to Excel using the same fonts and similar formatting, even though direct integration was provided for, I just switched. When clients printed it they looked almost indistinguishable from my old typewritten multi-font documents.
And that just happened to put the paperwork onto the same spreadsheet as the data. Left one blank tab for future AI use, and the two tabs to send to the clients are in place to the right of that.
Eventually there were quite a few tabs in between the blank placeholder and the final two tabs that the clients would receive. Each with its own function to further leverage built-in Excel capabilities and make further progress toward a "paperless" office.
Saved gobs of code there too, but it gets "worse" from here ;)
It all came together by writing more VBA modules until there was an automation "shell" around the working system. Once complete it would stop so you could look at the data, decide what to type into the blank tab ("naturally", in the absence of AI) then hit the button.
while I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary, these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on Excel as their go-to tool for everything:
be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead…
…often leading to problems down the line when the limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't made) would show more and more but they wasted already so much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they would be even more reluctant to the possibility of switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.
Another reason I did so (at a different job, actually, the one immediately prior to Samsung) was that the only other language I knew to any degree was Python, and while I did compile one Python program for Windows to more easily distribute it, Excel Just Worked.
That one estimated nominal and peak loading on electrical distribution circuits by querying a DB for consumption on a given branch, and comparing it to a table containing current handling capabilities of various kinds of ACSR (overhead power lines). It was easier to do that in Excel because people were already used to it for various calculations.
Also if you’re wondering, yes, we had some bespoke software whose name escapes me that was specifically created to model electrical circuits; unfortunately no one knew how to use it, but one guy thought he did, and convinced management that we didn’t need to pay for training because he would train everyone else. He did not.
In hotel industry they need to calculate and set a price for each room/night. Typically that's done by solving convex optimization (e.g. simplex method) and using "shadow values" from it as the price per room.
Lo and behold, not every math package provides "shadow values". So you either buy a specialized math tool, or... use Excel, that has it built-in.
all about the joys and problems developers encounter using kubernetes/k8.
And reading now, today here about Excel/VBA, it struck me that something was missing: couldn't I eliminate 90% of computer software and ease 80% of software devops simply by building/selling a system that ran purely Excel atop kubernetes?
I mean, isn't that all there is to computing nowadays? Plus a little social media? And some AI for fun and maybe a little Excel/k8 work as frosting on the cake.
EDIT: Upon some further thought and prompting by helpful anonymous others, I have found a slightly different path: a FORTH/kubernetes system that will be used to bootstrap versions of VBA & Excel to the cloud. This will be made available to the great unwashed masses of humanity (and their AI friends) for implementing social media for all.
Bingo. Working in an automotive OEM the entire company works on excel specifically excel vb scripts. No one knows why and no one has figured out how we got here. But it’s slow and steady abuse excel.
Largely, yes. Another department built a Python script that mostly was a driver for Selenium, because while they weren’t allowed direct access to some DB, nothing stopped them from automating a script to click various buttons in the shitty IE6 web app and scrape the results. I also recall they found that while passwords for said web app needed to be changed every N days, there was no lookback, so they had the script rotate between two passwords.
In my case, another not-insignificant factor was that multiple people on the team were quite good at abusing Excel and VBA, but only two others knew any other programming languages. One of them was an engineer (not SWE, engineer as in fab tool engineer - I think he was an EE) who occasionally wrote stuff in C for fun, and the other was also an engineer, but one who had convinced management that we should create an in-house SWE team. Great idea, and we weren’t the first to do so; unfortunately our manager was abruptly replaced, and his successor saw no value in the proposition.
Also how the simplest, fastest and most secure way to send someone from another corporation a file for collaboration is an encrypted zip and phone in the password.
Roko's Basilisk or whatever it is should more properly be called Excel's Visual Basicilisk - once Excel becomes self-aware it is going to punish everyone who tortured it for decades.
It just sounds like Mail Merge to me. Which if you were using a computer for work in the 90s, you might know something about. (It was also convoluted) :)
