On 21/02/2011 08:19 AM, Le_Forgeron wrote:

> Excel is a sandbox: it make nice graphics (yet not all of them keep
> being available across its versions) but is usually overused for database.
> It's fine to use excel as a sketch, but any real production should stay
> away from it. Alas, it's so eye-candy that it usually stays with the
> uneducated people in charge (like CEO and other administrative/marketing
> people).

It's true enough that my company's IT department keeps *all* of their 
records in Excel spreadsheets. License keys, user account records, 
everything like that... all spreadsheets. Never mind that only one 
person can work on it at a time and that people can screw up each 
other's updates and all the rest of it. How hard would it be to put this 
stuff into a trivial Access database? Not very. But apparently our IT 
department is too stupid to understand why this would be a good idea.

For my part, the entire reason that I'm using Excel is that I *want* 
graphs. If it were somehow possible to make gnuplot draw graphs from CSV 
data, I'd use that. (It's scriptable, after all.) But since it isn't, 
I'm stuck with Excel.

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