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A comment on Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition). Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) by OrvalWintermute on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:50PM (#34071459)
110% agreement on Excel

The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups, then capture it all into a macro is amazing.

I've really enjoyed using Excel as a Postgres frontend, with a real Postgres DB instance handling data, and then using the report functionality to dump to Word.

While a pro reporting engine and cutting out MS Office altogether would be a better longterm solution, it is hard to beat for quick & dirty results.

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Re:Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) by towawy on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:54PM (#34071526)
I'm curious, how did you establish the Postgres connection?
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Re:Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) by OrvalWintermute on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @03:49PM (#34072329)
I used ODBC [1] out of the big list of options [2] which gets a bad rep but worked for my use-cases.

The commercial devart plugin [3] looks pretty neat too but I haven't used it yet

I've also tried the JDBC connectivity option too [4], but with some different use-cases in mind for Postgres (not about Excel)

[1] https://datacornering.com/how-to-connect-to-postgresql-datab...

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/download/products/2-drivers-and-i...

[3] https://www.devart.com/excel-addins/postgresql/

[4] https://jdbc.postgresql.org/

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Re:Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) by liotier on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @03:50PM (#34072342)
> The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups,

Do yourself a favour and ditch vlookup and hlookup in favour of the recently introduced xlookup, which even obsoletes index/match !

I try to keep my exploratory joins out of Excel, but I admit that I often don't resist the immediacy of Excel's poor man's joins located right where I need them.

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Re:Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) by codesnik on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @11:12AM (#34082568)
Took them long enough to add it.
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