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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Using any tool but Excel has the same problem as finding programmers who are willing to use some obscure proprietary programming language. They're going to worry about career lock if they're not developing portable skills.

Even though Excel is proprietary too, it's ubiquitous enough that people don't have to worry about it.

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What about a tool that tracks updates to shared Excel spreadsheet and replicate them in a SQL database?

And then, if somebody makes a change in the database, a trigger will update the spreadsheet

Such a two-way binding makes it possible to continue relying on spreadsheets for UX, all the while the data is not locked in there and we can also have other processes handling the data (a web app, some cron job, etc)

Maybe market it as an API for excel or something

I don't use Excel much, but I do the analogous kinds of things with Python and Jupyter notebooks. The problem is that adding some kind of layer requires the involvement of corporate IT, which blows away the advantages of DIY'ing things.

That's true, nothing is as ubiquitous as Excel. But Excel is not designed for multiple people simultaneously updating data. At some point you need a database.

It's not perfect, but Excel can track changes by multiple users. Excel files shared on OneDrive/SharePoint allow multiple people to simultaneously update the data, and it tracks each individual change by each user.

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