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There's a real back-and-forth struggle for me with spreadsheets. I find people very frequently reach for them for things that they do really well: data slicing and dicing, ordering and sorting, formulae that cross-reference cells, and so forth. However, the contents of those spreadsheets are often (for me) not numeric, but text, and working with text that's longer than a few words in Excel is still a huge PITA, even after all these years, because Excel still thinks of the contents of cells as numbers first. Consider the output of your average audit. You'll have tables of findings, each of which needs a due date, a risk rating, a description of the problem, a description of the solution, auditor notes, customer comments, responsible party assignments, and so forth. (Yes, those would eventually go well in a tool like Jira, but that's for later--this is coming out of an audit visit.) From a data standpoint, putting those in a spreadsheet makes sense: you can now order the findings by date or risk rating, hide ones that don't apply, cross-reference findings between visits, and so forth. However, from a text perspective, it's awful: the descriptions might run to multiple paragraphs, comments and instructions need more complicated formatting than just "bold or italic", some fields should be constrained on content while others need to be free-form, and so forth. All of those things work much better in a Word table than in Excel cells, but putting the content in Word utterly removes the ability to data-manipulate. So you wind up either creating some Frankenstein hybrid solution or with crushing one perspective to satisfy the other. If Microsoft wants a win for Excel, making it an order of magnitude easier to deal with free-form text in cells would be an enormous step forward. |
A really simplified version of access that works from one underlying spreadsheet as a data source perhaps?