Formula 1 management shocked team used Excel for 20k-part inventory (2024)

> So, Vowles blasts Excel, variously describing it as "a joke" and "useless." However, some might argue that this office software doesn't have issues managing a 20,000-item parts list, and an expert Excel wrangler could have made a big difference to the spreadsheet users.

>For some examples of pushing Excel to its proper limits, recently, we reported on a software developer managing to shoehorn GPT-2 (the 'Small' version with 124 million parameters) into Microsoft's spreadsheet app to create a working local LLM. Earlier this year, a hobbyist built a functional 16-bit CPU with 128KB of RAM and a 16-color display into Excel...

Not sure it's really a skill issue here. Running an LLM or Doom in Excel doesn't solve the logistics+Ux challenge of having a massive Excel file that's hard to navigate.

Doesn't mean people don't do it, whether more on whether they should.

But what would've been a smarter software for this kinda use?