Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.
Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.
I work as a network tech for a globally spanning ISP specializing in fiber services, handling major maintenances that are service effecting for business and government customers (SLAs are in effect). These maintenances are planned and tracked through various excel sheets - housed either in a shared network drive (so yeah, we may run into issues where multiple people are trying to edit the same doc at once), or excel tables in a SharePoint.
Prior to the merger of companies I recently went through, we had actual database systems to track this stuff that worked just fine. And now we’re relying on the same shit a grad student would use to track their doctorate progress. It’ll work until it doesn’t. Looking forward to the shit-show if it gets me overtime.
This is basically what I run for a living and it’s definitely not glamorous.
Employers get what they demand, what they deserve. Anyway excel works as a database until around 1 million entries…
Once you get to a million just start a new one and create a “master” spreadsheet that uses power query to append them all. Problem solved ;)
Don’t tell anyone but I actually do this.
I feel you. Working in healthcare, ms office is the only thing consistently installed site wide I can take advantage of to run a db.
Couldn’t you use Access instead of Excel or is that not possible for your use case?
Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.
Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.
I work as a network tech for a globally spanning ISP specializing in fiber services, handling major maintenances that are service effecting for business and government customers (SLAs are in effect). These maintenances are planned and tracked through various excel sheets - housed either in a shared network drive (so yeah, we may run into issues where multiple people are trying to edit the same doc at once), or excel tables in a SharePoint.
Prior to the merger of companies I recently went through, we had actual database systems to track this stuff that worked just fine. And now we’re relying on the same shit a grad student would use to track their doctorate progress. It’ll work until it doesn’t. Looking forward to the shit-show if it gets me overtime.