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OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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It's a good thing that no serious company uses excel spreadsheets to manage their data, right? Right?
Of course not! We employees of Fortune 500 companies use Google Sheets to manage critical data.
It's in the cloud, that's how you know it's good.
(I'm not even joking....our VP said this)
Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.
They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
Companies now prefer cloud storage because they will still have the data if they fire you as your access will be lost immediately. You could delete all local files and it will take lot of time and effort to recover them.
Does that mean the install size might wind up being less than 23.2 gigs?
I bet, they think about surface running edgeOS, lol
I just wish the whole 'cloud' thing would die in a ditch specifically for people like that.
No, most use-cases don't need to be in a cloud.
You are 99.9% paying more for that setup than having people who understand servers.
And if you need the cloud, then hooray for you, but it should not need to be subsidized by thousands of small customers who jumped on the wrong train.
Agreed.
This is some of the best writing as to how/why/when cloud sucks.
I've shared it with my consulting friends, so they can more easily explain to (SMB) clients why cloud isn't necessarily a good answer.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy :D
Be me, postal worker. One of our machines uses a csv file to attach zip codes to bins. See fresh engineer decide to change one zip code in notepad really quick. See file's formatting get wrecked. Spend next 6 hours watching all the mail spit out of the very last bin every time they think they finally fix it as if machine has irritable bowel syndrome. Engineer earns nickname 'boy wonder' first week on job
This is why I always save contents as a new file instead of overwriting the original one when I'm using a machine that isn't mine. I've been burned so many times by flimsy newline characters, proper unicode support, legacy encoding and many other stuff you assume it should be already in place.
There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!
Look, if Excel is the last mile and everyone is properly plugged into a corporate database to pull numbers, then great.
But way too many companies manage everything from a network share full of xlsx files...
Not us, ours are google sheets
I think it's a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you're probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it's somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that's what gets used.
When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
One of my seniors uses xls as a word processor. I screamed but Teams was on mute.
As in, would type up a memo in Excel? Woof.
Sometimes I want a more free-form tool that can be a journal or a checklist or a spreadsheet so that I can plan and calculate and such. My personal journal sometimes reads like The Martian, "Okay, my solar panels make 165 kilowatt hours per sol, and I need 47 of it for my project, meaning I have 108 kilowatt hours per sol left over..." But I look at things like OneNote and fall right off them.
cries in data analyst
Did you know our company is over a thousand years old, possibly even two? Recent dives into our digital archives have unearthed invoice records dated to the year 1021, though we're also investigating the validity of one dated to 215.
Whoever decided to make dates a manual entry text field without validation should be forced to write SQL by hand, without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, syntax checks, reference or looking up stuff, querying a database with no schema or data dictionary.