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Comment by mrtriangle | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, I actually had a client who demanded that the data in their project be done in excel (with multiple files ranging from 1-3 gb in size!). Both myself and my partner tried exhaustively to use a database or even JSON/XML solutions but the client kept repeating "in the real world business is done in excel!" Needless to say it was a nightmare.

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I don't have the full picture here but by moving away from an Excel format you are also potentially taking away a lot of control they have themselves over managing the data and working the data which Excel is extremely good at with little to no programming.

Your point is true generally, but I have yet to use a version of Excel that can handle multiple gigabytes of data without serious performance degradation and probably a lot of crashes.

Which would matter, if businesses cared. I spend 4 days every month compiling a 1.5GB, Excel-based report. 80% of that time is spent with Excel frozen up and me playing on my phone, hoping that when Excel unfreezes it doesn't crash.

I suggested porting the process to Access with an Excel-based front end, which would cut the compilation time down to 4 hours at the most. I was denied due to the fact that whomever supports it after me will more than likely not have Access experience, and told to continue with the 4 days of hours-long freeze ups.

Corporate life for you, I guess.

This is seen all the time in Accounting departments. GAAP and STAT financials in spreadsheets with millions of linked documents and macros. A large amount of this deals with business logic being tied directly in Excel. Their data and the constraints around it are embedded into the spreadsheet. Segregating the data from the spreadsheet means adapting the business logic from Excel and maintaining it in two places. (Source: I work with an accounting department that regularly deals with spreadsheets that take anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours to load/process/filter).

Excel is absolutely standard in accounting circles. It has the benefit of allowing accountants to do all sorts of things without knowing how to program.

Maybe your client was wanting ubiquitous Excel-compatible export/import - not for the back end to actually be Excel? Making any table in your app exportable to at least CSV is pretty straightforward.

I think that is perfectly logical, the project was basically a series of command line tools. I tried to swap out excel for CSV or at least TSV, the client demanded .xls in .xls out. Believe me we tried every suggestion and that was as far as the client would negotiate. We got it to work and I died a little inside.

Obligatory "Excel as a database" link (you'll thank me for it):

http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm

That person is obviously bat-shit crazy. I am very surprised to hear that Excel or any other spreadsheet program will open multi-gigabyte files without exploding.

This.

When moving from a mostly broken .xls data export system to a CSV file with the same data, we got lots of complaints from customers that it was too hard to use.

CSV files ARE broken in Excel. Have you ever tried importing a column of data with numbers that contain leading zeros / are not meant as numbers? There are at least 5 ways to do it wrong.

I know how to do this in LibreOffice (requires an extra step above and beyond double clicking) but honestly I do not know how to do it in Excel, and I would not attempt to learn or teach this knowledge to a person who does not have experience with a different spreadsheet tool first.

I will send them .xls formatted files instead.

"Well, that explains why the business world is so broken"

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