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A comment on The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook. Parent comment

Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by fpoling on Saturday February 13, 2021 @05:59PM (#26127823)
Well, I observed the opposite effect when a complex Excel spreadsheet was replaced by an Access DB that allowed a small company to discover that they had extra assets for like 200K USD. And the original Excel author realized how much more sense the data made once he saw visualization of data constraints and relations.

But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.

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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by Spooky23 on Saturday February 13, 2021 @06:03PM (#26127867)
Oh totally.

My beef is that tech folk have a tendency to make themselves the customer, or maximize convenience to IT over whatever the actual problem is. Internally, the politics of the company tend to dictate this stuff. In the marketplace, software is usually much better!

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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by ethbr0 on Saturday February 13, 2021 @06:49PM (#26128207)
I think this can be distilled as "most tech folk are extremely bad at valuing each business use case separately."

Tech folks: That's a business use case

Business users: This is something I do 500x a day, this I do 10x a day, this I do once a month

PMs are supposed to be the ones to do this work, but they tend to be technically clueless and blinded by project timeline spreadsheets.

BAs usually don't take the time to actually ask the user "Why are you doing this?" and get all the nuances.

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