Original post: social.coop (Mastodon)
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Excel is often used by people that don't know what a database is, and you end up with thousands of rows of denormalised data just waiting for typos or extra white spaces to fuck up the precarious stack of macros and formulae. Never mind the update/insert anomalies and data corruption waiting to strike.
I have a passionate hate for Excel, but I understand that not everyone is willing to learn more robust data processing
The precarious stack of macros and formulae that you also can't version control properly because it's a superficially-XML-ified memory dump, not textual source code.
Almost every nontrivial use of Excel would be better off as, if not a database, at least something like a Jupyter notebook with pandas.
I haven't even thought of that. I might just try this for fun.
I do bioanalysis without a sample management system. I recently had a 1000+ sample project with 6 analytes, all samples needing a few reanalyses due to everything in this whole project being complete shit.
I spent probably three weeks of time just tracking samples to figure out what needed what analysis through excel. It's so painful knowing that a proper python script could do it in a few seconds.
What's stopping you from using a proper python script?
It's probably because Access fucking sucks, leaving excel as the only database adjacent program available to office workers. I would love to be able to use anything but excel on my projects. Hell, python and some CSVs would make my life so much easier, but I ain't going through IT to let me have that, and it opens up a HUGE can of worms in my line of work if I start using homemade scripts. The execs can pay for a LIMS system if they want me more productive.