The question is, do the same firms ban Excel? Excel spreadsheets often end up as shadow databases in unlikely places.
It doesn't require you use all of that properly, but it's there.
The modern alternative is to use JavaScript/TypeScript, which makes such solutions cross platform (including MacOs, web etc.):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overvie...
BTW sqlite can run SQL queries on CSV files with relatively simple one-liner command...
This sounds like how we pass so many stupid laws. Nobody thinks about 2nd order effects.
The sheer volume of data that needs tending to may even grind certain departments to a halt! What a great opportunity! It'd appear I'm positively stellar at this!
For clarity, while I did have some rather perverse fun toying with the idea, I do not actually think it should be implemented, or at least certainly not in one fell swoop and as-is. Mostly for the aforelisted reasons. This is what I actually intended to convey.
Though for better or for worse, that doesn't mean I think the notion is completely meritless either, so I might still be deserving of at least some of your snark. But a lot of it was in jest from my side indeed.
This whole keeping an inventory, disabling items, and later taking them out completely is a chore I already do in other contexts. While it does work, it is anxiety inducing, doesn't really scale well, and it's quite miserable to go through with. It's the cost of keeping things organized as far as I'm concerned, with no real way around it in the general case. The best one can do is try and mitigate it, by monitoring for patterns and building out systems, to automate and streamline the tedium away.
I do sincerely not know of other ways to keep things in check though, in lieu of which you do get the makeshift shadow ops with all of its pitfalls. It's kind of just life.
The only way that works is if the dev team is large enough to be responsive to business needs, which almost never happens because devs are expensive. The juniors who are tweaking business logic every day are functionally doing a role analysts can do if you just give them a sane API and data tools.
Access gets used for a shared DB and that is quite easy to corrupt. It is much more cost effective to have that in a proper central database (I supse SQLLite is better here as well)
Increase interoperability. Funnel data people from Excel into real DB technologies.
And if they did more to blur the lines between spreadsheets and databases, and make it seamless to work out of both Excel and Access, add more spreadsheet features to the data views, etc.