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Isn't that somewhat the usecase of Microsoft Access?

• pmontra 4y ago
  Yes, but from the point of view of an office (lowercase o) worker Access is that thing that, in decreasing order of importance 1) it's not clear what it does 2) it doesn't show them all the data at once all the time 3) it doesn't let them write formulas to work on the data 4) the few that saw Access in action say that they have to call a programmer to do what any Joe can do in Excel So whatever Access is doing Excel does it better and they can't understand why Microsoft developed a crippled version of Excel to manage tables of data. At this point I almost don't understand it myself anymore despite having seen all the years of Access and Excel ;-)
  • indemnity 4y ago
    In a past life the most “fun” I had as a developer on a CAD file processing solution was discovering that engineers loved linking Excel sheets to the CAD files so crucial calculations could be done there. And then having to make this work on Linux servers.
    • pmontra 4y ago
      I had to run a very large accounting Excel file inside a web service about ten years ago. The service was born as manually operated Excel sheet plus interaction by email/phone and they wanted to scale it on the web. I run it on Windows Server and paid somebody to write the Windows service to manage the Excel sheet. I can't remember which language I used for the web service itself. They eventually gave up, commercial problems, not technical ones.