Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by danso 2789 days ago
I vaguely understand (on a theoretical level) why the syntax for pivoting in databases is necessarily convoluted, but it does underscore to me how spreadsheets have a great advantage for everyday data-exploring, at least when it comes to ease of pivoting.

(by "everyday", I mean working with datasets small enough to fit within a spreadsheet's limits, and aren't yet important enough to need the reliability/regularity that comes with importing it to a database)
1 comments
nerdponx 2789 days ago
The ability to use Excel as a "front-end" for other data sources is underrated. For all its warts, Excel is a great data manipulation and exploration tool.
link
BariumBlue 2789 days ago
Due to system limitations, I made a stats tracker for my team in AccessDB. Due to the awfulness of access, I made an excel&vba front-end that would push data to and pull data from access.

It's been working surprisingly well so far, with no reported issues

link
bhandziuk 2789 days ago
I'm curious what you found to be the brickwall for you when using Access?
link
BariumBlue 2789 days ago
The existing "solution" was a gigantic excel where people would put it times and names.

In Access, when you enter times, you have to use a specific format, (the datetime group specified by the Windows default) rather than just "23:40" or w/e. I've seen a hack where the hour and minutes are separate boxes, but it wasn't pretty. Just this issue was enough to make Access unappealing.

Access's interface is a bit unintuitive, and given that most people I worked with weren't particularly technically capable, I preferred to present them with the familiar Excel interface (and a few extra buttons), rather than teach them an application they've never used before.

Plus, the existing workflow already used Excel, so I hijacked their workflow and their routine wouldn't be modified much at all (introducing a completely new system would cause a lot of friction and pushback, but one or two extra buttons was fine).

link
bhandziuk 2788 days ago
Huh. Next time you can set the date format to "mm/dd/yyyy hh:nn" and you can enter 24 hour times with a date.

But I understand wanting to not disrupt an existing workflow too much.

link