On 22/02/2011 11:45 AM, scott wrote:
>> 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.)
>
> Err, you did turn on filtering first on your table (select the header
> cells and click Data->Filter)? This makes sorting and filtering a
> no-brainer and AFAIK prevents people from sorting the data incorrectly.

Really? I had literally no idea that was possible. In 15 years of using 
Excel, I didn't know about this. (I wonder how many other people didn't.)

Rather than clicking on an unintuitive command name buried in a menu, if 
you click on the big "sort ascending" button right there on the toolbar, 
it can *totally* mess up your data. Fortunately there's an undo button. 
(I wonder how many people know that?)

>> Don't even get me started on how difficult it is to
>> cross-reference data in a spreadsheet.
>
> If you need to cross-reference beyond simple drop-down selection lists
> then you're probably beyond what Excel can easily offer as a simple
> database.

I meant stuff like if you have one spreadsheet with all the license 
keys, and another spreadsheet that tells you when each product was 
purchased, you're going to have fun trying to link one to the other. 
With a real database this would be a trivial table join.

(On the other hand, databases generally *need* to do joins more often 
because the data is usually normalised - something people don't bother 
with for Excel.)

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