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Comment by patmcguire | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who works in construction glass. (It's NYC, that's a big market). They ship millions of dollars of complex, custom molded glass every year. Everything's kept track of by emailing excel spreadsheets.

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That's disgusting. I feel filthy. I replaced a system in my first client school that also used excel attachments for tracking student data, exams results, attendance, assignments, etc. I could physically feel better once I saw my own implementation replacing email attachment system. Since then email-excel has been a sensitive topic for me.

I've recently found a department for the company I'm working for needs help as they have literally reached the limits of Excel.

They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won't let them.

I don't even want to know how they share the file or do backups.

I work in the healthcare industry. Basically we ARE the industry nowadays, and we use excel and word to keep everything "organized". There are some half-ass designed software,websites, and databases that are used as well, but it's amazing how a multi-billion dollar company can rely on this level of technology. I think they get these bids to run state government programs, and have absolutely no plan in place. And for some reason instead of just automating or updating things, the company just throws bodies at the problems and makes everything "production" based. I'm sure a lot of places are similar, but this is a white collar factory on such a massive scale, it literally sickens me. There are so many channels that approval for changes has to go through, that by the time some small minor change is implemented its already way too late, too distorted by having so many hands touch the problem, and too outdated.

"it literally sickens me."

Goo thing you're in healthcare...

hahaha idk why but for some reason that made my day.

An app that you can import any spreadsheet into and that generates web/mobile apps to collect the same information would be cool.

And that pushes the data back into the same spreadsheet and a relational database with change history.

Isn't that essentially Google Sheets + Forms? You create a spreadsheet and then generate a data entry form from it automatically.

Thanks.

Is there a queryable relational database?

Same with the electronics manufacturing industry, where inventories and BOMs are done in Excel. It is a pain in the ass, time consuming and error-prone. But that's what managers want.

Smartsheet is a pretty good direct replacement for emailing excel spreadsheets.

https://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour

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