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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • As a data consultant, I would say those companies already do question the process, and have done for decades.

    Yes there are countless situations where a dedicated system or database could and should replace Excel, but there are just as many scenarios where Excel is ideal, and swapping out a spreadsheet for what would be potentially tens of separate applications across the business, or one absurdly expensive behemoth, to perform tasks that could be done rapidly and clearly in Excel is neither practical nor economically viable for most companies. A spreadsheet is perfect for plenty of situations.

    My job is literally to help these companies move to appropriate database solutions, often transitioning away from Excel. But there’s no getting around that a spreadsheet solves (often simple) problems that are impractical with other tools. You can move a company to a supplier’s sector-specific solution and solve huge numbers of issues, but unless that solution exactly meets every aspect of the business requirements, there’s always going to be a fallback and it’s often Excel, for better or worse.

















  • I’ve been playing this the last few days too. I got the game on the Switch for the kids during lockdown and it became an instant favourite with them, but it was disappointing that you could only have one profile that had their own island.

    Several years later, we’ve all got MacBooks, and I have been messing about with emulation. There’s a particular emulator that Nintendo killed but forks are still maintained that run incredibly well on Macs. This past weekend saw the three of us reminiscing, each finally with our own island.