>> 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.

Excel is good for simple databases with infrequent updates for many 
reasons, the most important is that almost everyone has it installed on 
their machine and most people are familiar with it.  If you store the 
Excel file on a network drive it will get backed up regularly and ensure 
that only one person can edit it at a time.

There are also more advanced features to lock ranges of cell based on 
who is logged in if you want to limit certain parts of the database.  We 
use this on a couple of files where managers have to authorise certain 
items (it prevents non-managers from changing those cells).

> How hard would it be to put this
> stuff into a trivial Access database? Not very.

If you have no experience with Access it's not trivial to set it up 
properly, and if the only perceived benefit is that more than person can 
edit it at a time it's unlikely to be seen as worthwhile.

> But apparently our IT
> department is too stupid to understand why this would be a good idea.

Probably they just have other stuff to do they think is more urgent.

Post a reply to this message