It will live in a folder with:
Spreadsheet(1).xls Spreadsheet - shortcut.lnk Spreadsheet(2) - Copy.xls New Spreadsheet - DO NOT USE.xls
I have colleagues who have 20 copies of the same document with slight variations named like this in a folder. I honestly don’t understand how they function at work.
Sort by last modified
I work in Finance at my company and we always save revised copies for Excel files instead of saving over.
But we also have strict rules on it. File name is always “xxxx_Workbook Template Name_MMDDYY.xlsx” or “_YYYY_MM.xlsx”, depending on how often it gets updated.
Older versions get moved to a subfolder. It helps us go back and find out what something was if there was a mistake or revert back if Excel done fucks up.
Could just use git…
using git on a bunch of XML files saved into a binary ZIP file with a
.xlsxfilename extension is a hell whose circle we have not yet discovered
Honestly this is one I the reasons why I love Google sheets (controversial I know) as it has a built in version control system.
Excel has it too if you store it in onedrive or a sharepoint library with versioning enabled
Do people in your company know that there’s something called Windows File History?
It never works when you need it. Like “that file was too big”, that file was on a network share, that file is outside the window of how many old changes are saved. It’s like using an undelete utility. Sometimes you get lucky.
It’s better to save every change as a dated/numbered file or use a real source control system.
If there’s “Windows” or “Microsoft” in its name, you’re risking your business by relying on it
That’s just version control but worse!
Every tech noob user I see. Worse if it’s mac because 1) I cannot use it for the life of me and 2) almost every Mac user stores it in the same default downloads folder and won’t know what path it’s in unless they use the Finder tool.
Could be they don’t.
I just sort by date modified on my work folder and purge stuff older than a year. Anything of value was moved to its permanent home and properly document controlled.
It’s a river of trash yes but anything of value floats to the surface.
My files are all perfectly stored but it’s impossible to enforce proper naming on your colleagues… No matter how clearly you spell it out they will always mess it up.
We have a document repository managed by corporate governance and to file documents in it they need to go through a workflow which enforces naming convention/category and establishes approval chain, version control, and review intervals. Anything that is actively used for things should be captured in this system, there’s some that aren’t of course but it’s the standard and you’re laughed at if you reference documentation outside of this system basically. We do this to comply with audit requirements but it’s also just good practice and everyone basically sees the value in it, despite the mild annoyance of dragging your document in to a webpage and filling out some fields.
That’s why I don’t care about my personal document organization too much, because anything of value is getting liberated into a controlled doc template meant for it’s specific purpose and put into the system where it lives it’s life.
I routinely scan file shares to find the top oldest modified dates on files.
IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won’t as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
Whew, glad you didn’t say it wasn’t a password manager…
My old boss used it a password manager, no kidding…
My current boss who said she was retiring about 5 years ago (but didn’t…) used Excel as a password manager but would create her own little “boxes” of merged cells, then when she wanted to clear the contents of a merged cell she’d select the whole area and delete entire rows and columns, but she wouldn’t notice, so later then complain that the Gen Z office admin was “deleting important passwords” and when I pointed out that it was the boss doing that she’d either deny it, or repeat her process while paying closer attention then blame “Microsoft doing stupid things with this new Excel, it didn’t do this before the cloud” (don’t ask me why she thought her excel 2010 was on the cloud, other than the fact she saved this doc in Dropbox)
Said scape goat office admin transferred everything to OneNote when we did get finally get Microsoft 365, so at least the boss would stop accidentally deleting everything when trying to edit one thing.
Then the boss started to get annoyed at me for all my “stupid and impossible passwords”, how dare I have passwords like “nf6oO!D4t^q%Tnr3” and “&x#5Fr$s68iETYof”. I asked why it’s a problem, just copy and paste, my passwords are like that because I generate mine within a password manager and I’m not changing my process, I’m already heavily compromising by putting my passwords in her silly OneNote so she can log into accounts I’ve set up.
She had all her passwords in this document, but she wasn’t even using it to copy paste. She’d look at the document to read the password then type it out manually…
I showed her my password manager so she’d understand how useful it is, turns out our MSP had already set one up for her! But she didn’t like it because “it always asks me to check a code on my phone just to see my passwords, it takes too long to faff around with my phone, OneNote is just as secure because it’s in the Dropbox and you can’t get into the Dropbox without the password.”
Lord help me.
Lord help her! How has she even made it this far in life? 😂
Haha, I know right!
Our industry was notoriously late to go digital, even in 2020 I heard of organisations physically mailing out letters to clients because no one had an established individual user email system
Our industry (community centres and non accredited adult education) dominated by grannies, retireees who volunteer, and council workers that burnt out and don’t care to change the status quo the grannies have set up.
I think my boss used to be sharper in her prime (or rather, I know she was, because I’ve seen examples of her work from 20 years ago), but she’s in her mid seventies, and the lead poisoning and chemo-brain have taken their toll on her.
My old company had a saved spreadsheet on the O:drive called “Passwords”
Our users have had access to Password Safe, then Keepass, then LastPass, now Keeper. Guess what still pops up in screen shares.
Years ago, I’ve recommended KeePass to a girl from marketing who kept a long list of passwords on paper on her desk. She forgot the master pass after a week or so. That was the end of my trust in users’ ability to maintain a safe environment.
Haven’t used keepass but it should ask for master password at least once a day right? Or did she not require any credentials for more than a week?
Keepass will autolock after a minute or so, she used that pass few times a day…
My dad uses it as a password manager
Excel is a game dev and game test kit.
Like Snakes, Bowman, CimCity, etc
I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.
Spreadsheets don’t require a UI to be built. People don’t have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.
I’m an IT guy too and I’m the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya…might as well just use spreadsheets.
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
It’s more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
I see you’re in enterprise.
Power Platform with dataverse is essentially this
Technically even Access would make more sense. Isn’t that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Granted, SQL is still better but I’ve worked in government where you’re lucky to be using digital sheets at all.
I specifically avoided mentioning Access as I have hear horror stories about it when it goes too far.
All those stories are 100% true. And when someone did end up hosting an Oracle based SQL database, they’d pull from it in Access and it’d take several hours for one query. My R code did the same in about 10 seconds.
It’s not good software. Lol
Access has its uses, need a database to catalog your (parents) physical photo albums, or perhaps you want to have a database for recipies at home to make them easier to find, then in those cases Access should be fine if you are willing to maintain it.
Reminding me of corrupted .mdb files means I need more alcohol tonight to pacify the demons in my head
Isn’t that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Not sure about the current state of things since I haven’t used MS Office in decades, and I believe it’s entirely made of web apps now, but Access definitely used to be extra. As in, there always were at least two editions of Office, one that included Access and one that didn’t. And the former was significantly more expensive.
I actually know this one. Access is available through the MS Office 2019 bundle officially and they pretend it’s not really there with 365, but if you have Office365 you can download the app version to work offline. Access still doesn’t show up on the main list in the app, but if you search it’s there. There’s also a way to search it in apps online in 365 but it just downloads it and only runs in the app.
I recently went back to school and the basic degree requirements necessitated an intro to CIS class. It was just a glorified MS suite class. But I had an interesting time figuring out how to get to Access and no where online makes it clear. That’s the main reason I typed this out. Maybe some day someone else will have the same issue and this comment will show up on a search and be able to help them. You’re welcome future person!
OF COURSE the actual devil would know such things… LOL
Its not that simple.
Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
But, generally, people know it is a horrible workflow and is prone to failure. But there is no time and resources available to revamp the entire system. Because that likely involves going “offline” for the migration as well as the subsequent retraining. Its no different than the technical debt we all laugh and cry about. We know that server is held together with chewing gum and shoe strings but we don’t have time or authorization to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. We are just hoping it doesn’t fail at a bad time.
If you’re lucky? You can periodically export the excel sheet to a database (sql or access, it doesn’t matter). You are still doing things wrong but you at least have a recovery option at that point. But, if you can’t, you are more or less fucked and know it.
As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
Shit, I’ll mock them. I’m too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I’ll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I’m a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
Dudes rock
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It’s great at (correspondence) Battleship with a coworker though. Didn’t see this on the “not a…” list. Oh, and (correspondence) Guess Who!
I love the idea of xls applications, that’s really evil!
Correct, it’s for tracking work items.
You would be aghast at the sort of horrors my previous place of employment used- not even Excel- Google Sheets for.
It’s not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I’ll reject that shit without reading it and type “lmaoooooooo…” To the review character limit.
My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn’t make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.
It depends on the scale. I’ll agree that excel is a great tool for household finances.
They said inappropriate.
I just thought they were depressed by the things they’ve seen and needed some inspiration
If you wanted to inspire them, you should have shown them this.
The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me…
Sometimes it’s okay to fire a client.
Like… into the sun with an oversized circus cannon?
Some of my clients I’d like to actually set on fire
What’s the use case?
Like for anything financial, Excel files are preferable.
Although I will say this. Companies are lying when they say they want Excel exports. They don’t. They want CSV but they don’t know the difference.
That’s… a normal usecase? Importing exporting excel files?
Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
My client has an MBA. Please be gentle with him
My sides. 😂
It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
That makes sense if they’re transitioning people who have been doing it the old way for 20 years.
ITT, very salty IT guys… I’d rather folks use Excel then some home made stuff. That’s the real nightmare fuel. VB, not .net, just VB, from 1995. You’ll beg to have bad Excel after you deal with that stuff. 😵😱😭
The scripting in Excel is VBA, which is VB6. So, basically what I’m saying is that you can have both!
In .xls … no thanks
My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
To me its amazing they’ve been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a “proper” system. Kind of assuming it wasn’t a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
Migration is expensive and time consuming so wouldn’t be surprised if laziness played a major role in that even if its obviously a problem
That’s true and I’ve seen this thing a lot to the point people were buying assorted spare parts for a refrigerator sized server circa 1998 almost 20 years later while the entire business was complaining about how slow it was for a majority of those years. Our data center dates back to the 80s so there’s some great artifacts still lurking around.
Oh it absolutely did not work properly. We lost a $300M lawsuit because the system would bill clients wrong.
rofl that’s kind of amazing then. I’m used to legacy stuff that nobody wants to touch because it’s functioning how it’s supposed to.
My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn’t even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
The software my company makes still uses VB5 for the front end 🙃
🍻🫗
Me, being scolded for using ipynb apps to deliver rapid feature turnaround to customers, generating a million dollars in revenue:
Our finance department, tracking that revenue in a 700MB excel spreadsheet which is version controlled by a 13 year old email thread:
How in the world does that spreadsheet even open?
what do you mean, Excel isn’t a Database?
It is according to UK’s National Health Service: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
I love this part: “To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.”
There is an ODBC driver for Excel. Not to put data into Excel – To get it back out, treating it as if it were a database.
This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
My dad asked if I could look at a spreadsheet he uses at work, maybe fix a couple of things that he has to manually adjust. This meme is frightfully accurate, the earliest parts of this thing are older than some of the junior devs on my team.
At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she “accidentally” sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone’s wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
- She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
- Don’t know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
- Everyone was pissed lol
It shouldn’t matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don’t realize their value.
In fact, it’s illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone’s wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
A friend who is senior by two years found out that a new hiree was getting paid more than he does for the exact same role. Understandably, he was pissed and left.
And that’s exactly why wages should be transparent. So people can make an informed decision if they are valued enough at the company or if they should go somewhere else.
That’s silly, due to inflation almost all our new hires make significantly more than people with 5-10 years of additional experience.
We are having to increase new hire starting compensation by ~10% annually just to get anyone to apply.
Why would you tell your employees how much they make, it will only inflate payroll by ~20%.
Oh no. Actually paying your workers costs money?
Anyways I heard there was a holiday deal on rice at Safeway. I need to get on that. See you around!
Why would you tell your employees how much they make, it will only inflate payroll by ~20%.
GOOOOD! As it should be. Dear god, you just wrote out in public that you aren’t properly paying long term employees their fair share.
If you can’t compete with paying fair wages to all employees then you should go under!
deleted by creator
Hero. Salary negotiations must have been a riot that year lol
I wouldn’t call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees’ tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn’t prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
What a hot mess. Were you one of the people that was able to get a salary adjustment in the positives at least?
No :')
Damn, I’m sorry friend. :( I know that sting
Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc… And it got “got” by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly…
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe. Ransomware blocks the company’s access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn’t stolen, it’s just unusable
Probably, but the message said if the company didn’t pay the data would be “auctioned off on the dark web.”…
I dunno the liklihood of that actually happening but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible… After all, they have the key to decrypt it and no reason to assume they didn’t also have the files… Something was hitting cpu and network usage to 100% for several days across several locations… It was a bad time. It’s probably more likely a feint to just install crypto bs on servers while IT is distracted, but still I have no reason to believe it wasn’t possible.
I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
She didn’t remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
Good, thats what sick time is for…
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can’t be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren’t in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can’t just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
Sounds like you have too much work for the amount of people if one person leaving cripples you all so hard.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it’s still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don’t care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn’t an argument on the merits of having sick time available it’s just a dick move to use it when you don’t need it when there’s more than enough time to use when it’s actually needed.
Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.
HR says salary info is confidential.
HR says leaking confidential info is a serious offence.
HR commited the very same offence
And gets away with it.
I’ve been on both sides of this as a sysadmin for almost 15 years then as a data analyst. IT has so many requirements and barriers and any end user tool you have free access to will possibly be an easier route than procuring a boutique solution through IT. Yes of course IT will do it proper but that takes longer, just build a tool in excel and use an access database on the file server cause its something you can just immediately do. Yeah its not “right” by IT standards and causes headaches for IT but sometimes it’s whatever gets the job done next week is what’s going to be in the businesses best interest.
Also a lot of these tools are used how they were designed to be used. If a couple people have a function they need fulfilled and some excel tool with macros can provide that in less than a month and save those people a ton of time then I don’t see a problem with it. Just make sure SLA is very clear make it clear they can’t blame IT if there’s problems, offer the best advice for risk management.
On one of my last jobs they required us to do a straightforward but time consuming task with excel, it was ideal to automate it in software but my manager won’t ask the dev team because he said it would be very expensive and they were focused on more important things. I did it with macros on excel and word and kept it to me and my coworker, so we had like two hours of free time everyday, only had to look like we were busy with the sheet.
It’s unfortunate when they are short sighted like this. They would rather have 8 people do the work over a week that 1 could do in a day with the right fix.
However often there is rarely the resources or the people with the vision in the right role to push for these solutions.
My take is that Excel is great for people to throw together quick and efficient tools for their own use. The problem is when these get distributed and then everyone uses something that has no version control or QA/QC.
I see this a lot because an engineer gets annoyed with IT or existing software restrictions and learns enough VBA to be dangerous. (Spoiler, it me.)
Didn’t the UK’s covid track and trace system break because it was running on excel
It was running fine until ppl really started getting sick!
How rude of them!
Having worked in 3 companies, Excel sure seems like the most popular database.
And asset management software and internal program GUI and collaborative coding software and even (in one case) version control.
My boss used it for marketing control and CRM at one point. I put a stop to that real quick.
Someone in my department suggested that project plans should be moved from Excel to MS Project.
It was 50-50 relief vs panic
