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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But Access itself is not intrinsically evil, it is just a tool. Yes, I’ve seen some horrific examples of just what you can do with MSAccess. But we all make mistakes while learning; the problem really is that businesses then use these badly-designed systems to do important jobs. It is always a mistake to run mission-critical processes on some software written by your nephew as a college project. Yes, the development cost is cheap, but the maintenance cost, or cost to your business in errors, will be high.

There was some discussion at work about whether we should restrict access to Access (sorry!) to stop people being able to create databases. I’m a great believer in empowering users and letting them learn, so I don’t really agree with this approach. But, not wanting an exponential growth in support issues, my policy is that I will help but not support. If you want to learn, learning by mistakes is the best way, and the idea that I won’t bail you out if it all goes nasty hopefully will prevent managers from allowing any of these creations to become critical parts of a business process. I’m an optimist.

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