[kwhitefoot]

And then he retires or gets run over by a bus and I have to spend three months reverse engineering it only to find that it is really just an over complex UI hiding a bug ridden home made database management system. Which I then reimplement in SQL Server and C#/VB.Net in a week; and the new version is faster, properly multi-user, more reliable, and actually maintainable.

[chapium]

Nah thats when you hire a consultant to support the spreadsheet at twice the rate. You can even pay them to make a new spreadsheet and train the next unsuspecting victim.

[kwhitefoot]

That's in fact what I was hired to do. I told them the first day on the job that they really needed a database, even sketched the schema. But they were adamant that it had to be an Excel solution so I wasted three months trying to untangle the crap that was there all the while trying to persuade them that a DB and a simpler front end would be much better. Eventually they agreed.

[chapium]

We've both seen too much... O_O