I am continually amazed at the amount of data that should be put and manipulated in a proper database that’s mucked about in spreadsheets instead.
I had a job at an actuarial firm once and it would frustrate the hell out of me to see people constantly trying to do joins and other relational operations using Excel formulae, not knowing that that’s what they were doing, spending ages and ages on such tasks, holding Excel training sessions on how to use functions like INDEX and MATCH, using a bunch of custom-made macros to give names to columns and fill down formulas, and still making tons of mistakes that wouldn’t even be possible with a SQL query.
They were bleeding time and money at an astronomical rate, but it didn’t matter because their competitors were just as bad.
I had a job at an actuarial firm once and it would frustrate the hell out of me to see people constantly trying to do joins and other relational operations using Excel formulae, not knowing that that’s what they were doing, spending ages and ages on such tasks, holding Excel training sessions on how to use functions like INDEX and MATCH, using a bunch of custom-made macros to give names to columns and fill down formulas, and still making tons of mistakes that wouldn’t even be possible with a SQL query.
They were bleeding time and money at an astronomical rate, but it didn’t matter because their competitors were just as bad.