When I discuss workflow and get told ‘and then we type it into this spreadsheet’, I worry. Spreadsheets do have their uses, and when used appropriately are a fantastic way to display or manipulate data. What they are not, is a database.
Unfortunately, a spreadsheet is a quick and dirty way of routing round system limitations, in the same way that storing all your data in a Notes field is. Don’t have a field to store ‘SnowmanType’ in? No problem, we can keep track of that in a spreadsheet!
I confess to having a personal horror of the spreadsheet database simply because, as a relational database person, they are just so.. so woolly. You can put anything anywhere. Ugh. For example, I work with a third-party supplier who sends me spreadsheets of (manually-maintained) data. One week, I wondered why my automatic import wasn’t working. It turned out to be because halfway down a column of data, she had suddenly transposed two columns, and what used to be Postcode was now SupplierName. That’s just wrong, and quite possibly immoral.
This horror of spreadsheets tends to make me quite a rapid developer, because I know that as soon as a problem has been identified, if I don’t come up with something sharpish, I’ll have a spreadsheet to defuse. The incentive of avoiding cleaning up an ‘Excel Database’ before I can import it into something more sensible, is quite a powerful one.
Don’t get me wrong, I use spreadsheets. I spit out data into them and format it into something pretty that you can then play with. But they are an output, not the whole solution. If I can’t delete all the data from your spreadsheet, and recreate it with minimal fuss, then you are storing your data in the wrong place and I need to help you with that.
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One Comment
I could not agree more, you would not believe the number of times I pick up new clients who have been using spreadsheets as a database, only to realise some way down the line that they have a bunch of unvalidated next to useless data.
The when you ask them for business rules to validate the data in their new database they say ‘We did not have these restrictions in Excel’ amazing!