>> It's true enough that my company's IT department keeps *all* of their
>> records in Excel spreadsheets.
>
> Excel is good for simple databases with infrequent updates for many
> reasons.

It's like the fact that all screenshots are always emailed as Word 
documents, even though it takes up far more space. It's just that nobody 
knows any better.

> 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 don't use that feature at all.

(Unrelated, but... I was astonished when I discovered how hard Access 
security sucks. Excel is much better at this.)

>> 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,

True. But we're talking about the IT department here. If we don't know 
how to work it, what hope is there?

> 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.

The other benefit of course is that you can trivially sort the data 
without screwing it up. (Excel makes it very easy to accidentally sort 
one column only, muddling up all the data.) It also makes inserting or 
deleting records vastly easier. (The same goes for adding or removing 
columns.) Don't even get me started on how difficult it is to 
cross-reference data in a spreadsheet. (Although admittedly it's 
unlikely you need to do that very often.)

>> 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.

This is from the department that has set most of our admin passwords to 
"our1Tr0x!"...

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