People without an ounce of programming skill abuse Excel on a daily basis and feel proud of the accomplishments. You see spreadsheets riddled with nested IF statements, VLookUps, etc. And then these folks are perplexed when they run into the inevitable Circular Reference or #REF!.
True, Excel can be used successfully for basic data storage and manipulation. Arguably, for the effort, I think it's a better solution than Access or more powerful DBs like SQL Server or Oracle. But, when the tendency among the intractable office newbies is to add layer (sorry, tab) upon layer to each spreadsheet that defeats the purpose of using these things as spreadsheets.
The illusion is that for many no Excel is too complex to justify moving "data" into a database. Frequently people who do such things are looked at as the Office show-offs or geeks.
But Excel is so easy to start using that it can't be anything other than a slippery slope to bad "applications" and poor decision models.
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People without an ounce of programming skill abuse Excel on a daily basis and feel proud of the accomplishments. You see spreadsheets riddled with nested IF statements, VLookUps, etc. And then these folks are perplexed when they run into the inevitable Circular Reference or #REF!. True, Excel can be used successfully for basic data storage and manipulation. Arguably, for the effort, I think it's a better solution than Access or more powerful DBs like SQL Server or Oracle. But, when the tendency among the intractable office newbies is to add layer (sorry, tab) upon layer to each spreadsheet that defeats the purpose of using these things as spreadsheets. The illusion is that for many no Excel is too complex to justify moving "data" into a database. Frequently people who do such things are looked at as the Office show-offs or geeks. But Excel is so easy to start using that it can't be anything other than a slippery slope to bad "applications" and poor decision models.
If Microsoft didn't exist, OS/2 would have been king!