I got bad news for this guy, his employer is only going to pay for excel and his coworker only knows how to use excel so he better learn to use excel. Also people do a lot of things in excel that have no business being done in excel.
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we’re going to be learning that.
Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.
Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.
I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.
I got bad news for this guy, his employer is only going to pay for excel and his coworker only knows how to use excel so he better learn to use excel. Also people do a lot of things in excel that have no business being done in excel.
I heard its good for databases…
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
some businesses just deserve to die, and are actively working towards it
My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we’re going to be learning that.
Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.
Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.
I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.