5 ms·
FWIW I have a friend who works with market analysis and his excel scripts save an enormous amount of manual labor, today. It was the best tool for the job, for
by klabb3 4y ago
FWIW I have a friend who works with market analysis and his excel scripts save an enormous amount of manual labor, today. It was the best tool for the job, for them. There are even international competitions in excel automation, which is kinda funny but also points to how far ahead Excel is for actual business uses.
Are there scaling issues? Version control issues? Absolutely! But again, that doesn’t mean that it’s not the best tool for the job.
It’s easy to mount the highest horse from a technical perspective, but as engineers it’s also our responsibility to be curious about what people are using voluntarily, and not just what we think they should be using.
- XorNot 4y agoMicrosoft's commitment to not adding modern accommodations to Excel, Access and VBA is infuriating. A git integration in the editor, and a decent test runner. Some API hooks do Jetbrains can do something with it maybe.
- zmj 4y agoOffice documents are zip files - you could get a start on this by version-controlling the contents individually.
- hinkley 4y agoI was this many years old when I learned that tar and zip on linux have an rsync compatibility mode that tries to do some cleverness with compression blocks to make it easier to diff two archives.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arminiusreturns 4y agoI thought they were xml?
- mnau 4y agoXML files in a zip file (plus images and other things). There are many individual xml files in a single zip file, each file (part) is generally responsible for different area, e.g. one file for one sheet cells, one file for style definition, one for comments, one for workbook structure and so on. The whole structure is called Open Packaging Conventions and it is implemented in `System.IO.Packaging`.