• socsa@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Last panel is wrong. Genie would just grant him an MBA from a top tier school

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I once looked through a textbook from my friend’s MBA course. The first thing I noticed was in a highlighted box in the chapter on business negotiating: “Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”

      These are the people that make 10X what I make.

          • Peddlephile@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Depends. It’s a business here and there are lots of young people with MBAs and not enough experience to contextualise the things learned within the masters. I mean, some are even doing it post grad.

            From my past experience with these types of people, I have a very low opinion on young people with MBAs. Business degree holders who want a shortcut to the top.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’ve probably had the experience of sharing the highways there with Germans cutting through your country to get to Austria and forgetting they were not on the Autobahn any more. I drove a rental car when I visited there years ago, and I’ve never had a more terrifying driving experience than looking in my rearview mirror and seeing empty road stretching back for miles, and two seconds later having a black BMW riding my ass and flashing its high beams at me.

  • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Japanese companies, this isn’t a wish, it’s a fundamental truth of the universe. Like gravity. No matter the scale or importance of them. I promise you your car exists because of an Excel 2003 file on some underpaid engineer’s laptop that they periodically sync with an inventory system.

    • Getawombatupya@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I once worked for a Japanese company where I had to make a presentation. In Excel, I shit you not. Then we had one of our “shadow” managers make a Japanese translation of the same thing. It took me two days to get the kerning and print layout right, especially with that weird english typeface that is Japanese standard, I hate to think how long the translator took to get their version right.

        • Petri3136@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I used to make a monthly document that was in English and Japanese. I used either Meiryo or Meiryo UI. That looked ok in both scripts but there is another font where the en looks shit. Or maybe I’m thinking of full width characters.

  • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.

    This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.

      • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)

        • supercriticalcheese@feddit.it
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          1 year ago

          Well excel nowadays doesn’t have issues with concurrent users if you have office 365 like many companies do.

          At that time it was Access with the files located at a company shared drive, the issue was concurrent writes I believe.

          • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Yes, but at the time Excel didn’t support concurrency either ;-)

            Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that’s only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.

            Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn’t, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that’s how they envisioned it to work.

          • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            Better yet, put your access backend to OneDrive to acquire an un-openable, un-deletable file.

            • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don’t have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      i…isn’t that the entire point of excel? what is it for if not to store data?

      similarly i remember a reddit comment that broke my brain, saying no one should be using excel, they should be using a ‘cell matrix organizer’ or similar. we all can name 5 off the top of our heads

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Excel is this weird mix of storing small amounts of data but so good for visualizing data. If people are saying it shouldn’t be used to store data they mean massive amounts of data as opposed to something like some small scale accounting for a fund raiser.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Excel has a purpose, but storing data long term isn’t it. It’s for calculating data. It shouldn’t be the single source of truth.

        One of the things Microsoft did to make it work was extending the row limit from 65k to 1M. Apparently, Economics professors were very excited about that one, which explains a lot.

      • ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.

    • eslaf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Employers get what they demand, what they deserve. Anyway excel works as a database until around 1 million entries…

      • xpinchx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Once you get to a million just start a new one and create a “master” spreadsheet that uses power query to append them all. Problem solved ;)

        Don’t tell anyone but I actually do this.

    • bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.org
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      1 year ago

      I feel you. Working in healthcare, ms office is the only thing consistently installed site wide I can take advantage of to run a db.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Couldn’t you use Access instead of Excel or is that not possible for your use case?

        • bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.org
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          1 year ago

          Unfortunately IT blocked Access installs because some staff were using it for mission critical processes, and upon leaving IT were required to maintain them. They felt excel was less likely to lead to scenarios like this.

          Little did they know excel projects are probably worse to maintain.

    • Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I work as a network tech for a globally spanning ISP specializing in fiber services, handling major maintenances that are service effecting for business and government customers (SLAs are in effect). These maintenances are planned and tracked through various excel sheets - housed either in a shared network drive (so yeah, we may run into issues where multiple people are trying to edit the same doc at once), or excel tables in a SharePoint.

      Prior to the merger of companies I recently went through, we had actual database systems to track this stuff that worked just fine. And now we’re relying on the same shit a grad student would use to track their doctorate progress. It’ll work until it doesn’t. Looking forward to the shit-show if it gets me overtime.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I mean it’s a simple file format so it’ll perform better because it doesn’t have to decode any complex formats or protocols.

      Big O? Never heard of it!

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “I have to make a brochure for the printing shop and I’d like to compose it in Excel”

    “There are actually five rules…”

    “In Powerpoint?”

    “Make that six.”

  • Max_Power@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    My 5th rule would be “no ‘fix my IT problem without me telling you what the error message says’”. Because fuck that

  • NotBadAndYou@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    Isn’t the Genie usually depicted as malicious, or at least mischievous? I would expect the Genie to grant the wish, knowing what a shitshow it would be.

  • CoupleOfConcerns@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, since the introduction of ‘tables’, pivot tables, Power Pivot and Power Query, Excel is way more viable to be used as a database. Tables in particular mean that formulas fill down and the range automically resizes when records are added.

  • Asudox@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Kind of related question: Is it okay for me to use JSON as a small DB? I just store basic blog page data there.

    • nierot@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I mean it will work, but for a blog I’d store the pages in markdown files, to make it easier to edit. For context, look into how Hugo works

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        1 year ago

        I thought of that as well. I might switch to that. It will make the organization better anyways.

    • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      TinyDB literally does this. in general its more of does this work for my use case and am i aware of its limitations.

    • kono_throwaway_da@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      A few circumstances to consider…

      If it’s just your own little tool and you don’t intend to share it with others: do whatever you want. SQL or NoSQL or JSON, it doesn’t matter. Use your own judgement.

      In my experience tho most homegrown JSON-based “databases” tend to load all data into the memory, simply because they are very simplistic (serialize everything into JSON and write to disk, deserialize everything into a struct). If your dataset is too big for that, just go straight for a full-fledged database.

    • Drew@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      yep, though IO might bottleneck you at some point, and then you can happily switch to mongoDB

    • iwasgodonce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      one of our partners we have to integrate with at work sends us reports in ms access format. it’s not fun, especially when everything is running in lambda and there doesn’t seem to be any good libraries for reading ms access files that would easily run in lambda.