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I used to do a lot of Excel programming, and I found the environment to be extremely unstable. I've had spreadsheets with thousands of entries with data that wo

• smacktoward 11y ago
  True, but that's not really what I was getting at -- I meant, just using Office as a front end for managing data that's actually stored somewhere else, like in a real database that cares about things like "consistency" and "durability."
  • rodelrod 11y ago
    I was doing a lot of this 12-14 years ago, building Access VBA front-ends to remote data sources in Oracle or MySQL (not PostgreSQL because its ODBC driver was practically unusable) and using Word and Excel for reports and publishing. It was a fast and easy way to build a fairly complex GUI, much better than anything we have for the web. It was also very stable—except for COM Automation, which was slow and error-prone (e.g. having Access drive Word for a mail merge.) Many of these applications are still in use to this day. What killed it for me was having the code stuck in the GUI builder rather than in text files. This meant that source control and testing demanded a lot of painful manual drudgery (and discipline, which not all the developers working on these applications had.)