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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

You damned kids never heard campfire stories of being brought in to consult on “scaling” a bespoke system for a growing company that has been limping along with VBScript in an Excel spreadsheet for five years past when it was still tenable to do so. The amount of feature parity required to get out of that blind alley often killed the project and injured the company. Some lived it, the rest of us knew someone who had.

There was a brief moment after Oracle purchased Sun where I thought Oracle might try to engineer am Excel competitor on Open Office that had an easier migration to a real database (Oracle), but that dream died early.

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FWIW I have a friend who works with market analysis and his excel scripts save an enormous amount of manual labor, today. It was the best tool for the job, for them. There are even international competitions in excel automation, which is kinda funny but also points to how far ahead Excel is for actual business uses.

Are there scaling issues? Version control issues? Absolutely! But again, that doesn’t mean that it’s not the best tool for the job.

It’s easy to mount the highest horse from a technical perspective, but as engineers it’s also our responsibility to be curious about what people are using voluntarily, and not just what we think they should be using.

Microsoft's commitment to not adding modern accommodations to Excel, Access and VBA is infuriating.

A git integration in the editor, and a decent test runner. Some API hooks do Jetbrains can do something with it maybe.

Office documents are zip files - you could get a start on this by version-controlling the contents individually.

I was this many years old when I learned that tar and zip on linux have an rsync compatibility mode that tries to do some cleverness with compression blocks to make it easier to diff two archives.

I thought they were xml?

XML files in a zip file (plus images and other things). There are many individual xml files in a single zip file, each file (part) is generally responsible for different area, e.g. one file for one sheet cells, one file for style definition, one for comments, one for workbook structure and so on.

The whole structure is called Open Packaging Conventions and it is implemented in `System.IO.Packaging`.

As recently as in 2014 my college friend was asked to help a company which was running on Excel and reached the point you mentioned.

IIRC he just optimized their sheets and set up a CRM for the things that had no business being stored in an Excel file and that was already very helpful.

Attempts at writing actual software to deal with the problem would have failed and everyone was acutely aware of that.

At my last job, my work was basically to read data from proprietary APIs and shit an excel table.

I think I was hit by everything. Easy stuff at first: Crlf issues, XML Apis, weird rpc apis.

Then, halfway through the project, the results had to change. Not only the order, datatype and headers (I actually overengineered the first version so those were configurable), but the format, duplicate on multiple columns (and empty fields counted as duplicate...). Worst job I've ever done. I'm also disappointed in myself tbh.

But now I'm a bit of an expert on excel format issue and limitations, and that already helped me.

FWIW IRC ANAL, a couple jobs ago there was a policy about only hiring copy/paste from Stack Overflow headcounts. Since good code was literally not allowed, scaling meant more servers with more RAM.

They eventually replaced me with a handful of their relatives, or at least it seemed. It was a lot of fun watching how many LOC one could "write" to request some trivial data from an endpoint. Luckily I was only golfing the latter half of that tenure so I have no regrets.

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