Re:Ask HN: How do I spend less time updating “business logic”?
by mh44 on Friday January 29, 2021 @03:28PM
(#25961989)
Oh interesting, will look into that! Excel works for one-offs, but with repeated queries, or if they're exploring data that they don't know exactly how they'd use, or if they want to affect changes in a system ("send email to all these customer ids"), they'd still have to come back to me?
Re:Ask HN: How do I spend less time updating “business logic”?
by taxcoder on Friday January 29, 2021 @04:15PM
(#25962633)
>they'd still have to come back to me?
Depends. I was dealing with accountants who were very at home in Excel. They were fine with linking Excel to a whole table or query and sorting and filtering for the data they needed. Note that Excel can be actively linked, rather than just doing a one-time import. Something like emailing a subset of customer ID's would have needed my involvement. My users were mostly using the data for discovery, looking for patterns and trends in workflow and client needs.
At a prior job I managed an Access application. Several accountants wanted to query some of the data but were not willing to work in Access. I used Excel to query the data they wanted. Then they could sort and filter to their hearts content.