| Software engineers who have had to deal with spreadsheets being used inappropriately. Spreadsheets are an extremely powerful tool, but they have limits. Their accessibility is part of what makes them so ubiquitous, but it also means people get comfortable and start using them beyond their limits. Spreadsheets (Excel ones in particular) are great and presenting tabular data and they're mediocre at most other things including crunching numbers, taking notes, storing computational data, providing user interfaces, and much more. It's often okay to use a sub-optimal tool, but you have to draw the line somewhere. A recent HN post[0] highlighted an example where Excel was being used to keep track of large-scale contact tracing data for covid in the UK. Excel is a mediocre database. It has hard limits on cell sizes and row/column counts among other things. They ran into one of those limits and lost track of 16K positive cases because of it. From my own experience, I've had to deal with repositories containing tens of thousands of Excel spreadsheets. They were used to capture verification data. Excel files are large and difficult to parse with scripts, which was bad enough. But the worst part was that Excel doesn't really have a syntax or schema, so users editing the spreadsheets would frequently create changes to the table layouts which would have to be accounted for as edge cases in scripts. I'd be lucky to even recover data from half the files using automation. I even encountered one Excel workbook with over 300 tabs! Every tool has limits and it can be frustrating working with popular tools when users fail to recognize those limits. I love working with Python, but I'd never try to write a kernel with it. Likewise, there is a time and place for spreadsheets. [0] https://timharford.com/2021/07/the-tyranny-of-spreadsheets/ |