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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that hard to spend 5 minutes setting up a decent database? Use sqlite if you really want something simple.

I guess you still have to understand locking (especially on distributed filesystems.) I've certainly seen people mess that up with spreadsheets.

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Sure, I'll just teach tell my wife to learn SQL and some devops while she's at it. After that I'll coach her on how to get buy in from management on this new system while she neglects her primary duties.

Throwing up a database and integrating it into a workflow/system isn't something anyone can just get up and do. I have to imagein you know that.

Yep! And then when your wife gets that promotion she wanted, she still has to spend time maintaining and making changes to the old database system because nobody else understands it or has the skills to change it.

Was it really a manual process? I read it as some system importing info automatically.

And if it was manual I am surprised that Excel did not complain about adding more than 65000 rows (or saving more than 65000 rows as XLS). If a user gets a warning about possible data loss they should investigate more.

The problem is people can't do this in a office. Nobody has admin rights on there computers. Everybody know how yo use Excel. We all know, if you have to make a ticket to your office IT for such things, you mostly have to wait a long long time and it never, never works the first time. I guess that is one of the main reasons, why the world runs on Excel (and MS Access). It just works, it's just there, no dealing with IT.

Sqlite is a bit of a special case, in my eyes. It's so ubiquitous that it's probably already installed somewhere on the average machine, just not as a top-level application.

Of course, there's a bit of a gap between "it's there on the machine" and "we can rely on it for useful work", but baby steps...

No it isn't, but in any big org the plebs are only allowed to use Office and anything else is IT captured.

Sure, Excel is instantly available. But also you get charting and formulas. Especially with formulas they've done something really right. You can transform a column in a few seconds while keeping the old one, tweaking the new one and having a graphical preview through the chart feature at the same time. Of course every Spreadsheet software can do this, but to me that's the ultimate killer feature

It takes a course to understand how to to use a relational database.

MS Access used to come as standard with Office and is actually the perfect solution to many of the problems that businesses use Excel for. It's very rarely that people actually used Access as Excel was far more intuitive and good enough for many projects especially in the early stages.

I can attest to this. I move job and my new work place used to manage everything in excel. Something's still are. Realising excel could not scale, and with no support for IT for a proper solution the "tech" guy (that is good with computers but not a developer) was tasked with creating a "database". What we now have is essentially 3 excel spreadsheet tables in access that you can run SQL on and input data using access forms. No normalisation, no well anything really. We're now coming to the point where access is creaking at the seams. I'm confident with properly designed tables and queries we wouldn't be, and I'm no expert either, but it will have to fail before there's a concerted effort to redesign or god forbid IT do there jobs.

Things are never 5 minutes. And it is just as easy to make mistakes with sql as it is with excel.

I have definitely just spent 5 minutes importing csv tables into sqlite so I can run a query against them.

Do note that anything other than Excel, UI/UX wise, failed.

When people wants a “database” they fire up Excel, start punching in numbers, solar calculators next to keyboard, and use eyeballs to search for strings.

Every time I see a problem like this I can't stop thinking that computer education is terrible everywhere.

We are able to teach almost everyone how to use complex software like Word and Excel. Why can't we teach people how to use a terminal, SQLite, or how to create a very simple Python script?

Well maybe it has something to do with the Windows monopoly and that they only want you to use their proprietary tools. If you learn too much then you will want to be free!!

Whenever you try to do something properly, some person in your organization condescendingly says "perfect is the enemy of the good".

And because Excel is "good" for a vast number of use-cases then people use it for everything.

Hey come now... we both need each other /s

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