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"Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system Excel is not a database (I don't mean that as a trivial correction, it's quite disti

"Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system Excel is not a database (I don't mean that as a trivial correction, it's quite distinct); many of the jobs done with it could conceivably have been done with databases but were not, so in a way it's opened up a whole market to store and manipulate more data than ever before on a small scale in businesses, and I suppose you could conceivably replace dbs with it in some cases. However I don't see it replacing databases in the businesses I work with — in my experience at least I see more data moving from excel over to databases and apps (with internal dbs) as it becomes complex or people want to share it than I see it moving the other way. For example imagine a CRM built in excel, scaling up to 1000s of customers and several users — eventually there comes a point where it is far easier to use a db and front-end than to try to manage that sort of data in excel by hand and share amongst several people. Data manipulation is an excellent example of the complex changes wrought by technical progress — there is an argument for saying that as technology progresses, we discover more work we can do with it, and data and analysis become more complex, not less — more jobs are created which simply didn't exist before. Automation doesn't always lead to jobs becoming simpler or humans becoming redundant, quite the reverse in our recent experience. Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop. Answer, zero. Graphic artists have become quicker, can do more work, and can produce work of higher quality in terms of resolution, type etc than before, but it's still quite a distinct job from marketing. One related example of a profession which has gone is typesetter though — they've been entirely supplanted by technology. Just to be clear I'm not saying technology never supplants anyone, but that the professions you listed are the farthest away from being supplanted and are not even on the horizon in most cases. Customer service is still really important in many jobs, interfacing with humans is extremely hard, and expert systems are not an adequate replacement for most humans yet, esp. in creative or customer facing roles — that will require a qualitative change in the nature of our software. Perhaps that will happen eventually (in some ways I hope it will), but we simply haven't made that leap yet.

VLM 13y ago
"Excel is not a database" It most certainly is used as one in the corporate world. That doesn't mean its a very good one, in the sense that a hammer isn't a very good substitute for a screwdriver. None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database. I agree I LOL when I see people my hand doing the equivalent of an SQL JOIN. To some extent, the older I get, the more I see people using computers as a somewhat different form of manual labor, rather than a replacement for manual labor. Rather than typing this form by hand on the manual typewriter, you use Word and call it progress.
- grey-area 13y ago
  None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database. In 1970 the businessman would probably have used a rather more old fashioned method - a piece of paper and an assistant to write down the figures on a page which looked very like an excel spreadsheet!

VLM 13y ago

"Excel is not a database" It most certainly is used as one in the corporate world. That doesn't mean its a very good one, in the sense that a hammer isn't a very good substitute for a screwdriver. None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database. I agree I LOL when I see people my hand doing the equivalent of an SQL JOIN. To some extent, the older I get, the more I see people using computers as a somewhat different form of manual labor, rather than a replacement for manual labor. Rather than typing this form by hand on the manual typewriter, you use Word and call it progress.

grey-area 13y ago
None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database. In 1970 the businessman would probably have used a rather more old fashioned method - a piece of paper and an assistant to write down the figures on a page which looked very like an excel spreadsheet!