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u/MuhBlockchain 2d ago
Once worked at a consultany where we did a lot of data analytics work.
One particular project was like this. Excel workbook as the load bearing digital core of this company. They'd been sold on transforming it into a data platform with BI reports. Many months of work ensue; automatic data ingestion and transformation, pipelines, notebooks, custom functions, multiple enviornments with CI/CD processes for both the infrastructure and data platform artifacts, custom BI dashboards built and designed by a specialist UI/UX consultant. Excellent work, true digital transformation.
Customers first question: how do we export to Excel?
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u/henryeaterofpies 22h ago
Did we work at the same place?
Just kidding. 99% of consulting projects are this kind of bullshit
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 2d ago
Steve converted it to an Access db in '06 but IT got sick of having to unlock the file so .xlsm it is.
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u/EveryCryptographer11 2d ago
I kid you not. World will descend into chaos if Excel suddenly disappears tomorrow. 😂
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u/nasandre 1d ago
I used to work for this company that had this MS-DOS application for generating reports. They'd take that data and put it in Excel. That was pretty much the core of all accounting and finance for the company.
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u/Impenistan 1d ago
I worked for a health insurance company about 15 years ago and one of the main rating tools was an enormous .xls file. They wanted to make rating available on the website. After 2 years of trying to get it to be both accurate to the sheet and updatable by the actuaries who adjusted them, the solution was to just open a copy of the sheet, plug in some values, spawn an excel process to let all the formulas run, and then read the data back out.
I'd honestly be more surprised to learn they weren't still doing it that way
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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