I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m currently involved in a small startup where loads of administrative, transactional data is contained and manipulated by hand

I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m currently involved in a small startup where loads of administrative, transactional data is contained and manipulated by hand in an ever-growing Excel spreadsheet. I’m a Mac user but there’s plenty of Windows machines with Office lying around, and my first gut instinct was to start throwing something together and importing the Excel file to populate the DB, and construct ‘robust’(er) queries & scripts for interacting with and getting reports from the data. Perfect? No way. But within a couple of days I was able to get something working more reliably and (albeit temporarily) “shored up” a major calamity waiting to happen. Am I proud of my work? Absolutely not. But it was quick, cheap, and cheerful. Eventually when urgency has lessened and there’s more budget (in terms of mind-space, time, money) we can start looking for developers that will take my kludge and make it into something more bullet-proof. For now, the leap from Excel to Access has been a huge leap forward (the kind that the physically illiterate offhandedly describe as a “quantum loop”, not realising that quantum leaps, though discrete in nature, are tiny).