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Re:New Zealand's $16B health dept managed finances with sing... by rrr_oh_man on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @11:57AM (#43333749)
The hive mind really hated (hates?) MS Access and I don't know why.

I built a mini ERP for my father's company when I was 16. Started out as an excel spreadsheet, but then added inventory, accounting, and printing contracts and reports.

He kept using it until retirement and was very happy with it. I could learn & apply SQL. Win-win.

Re:New Zealand's $16B health dept managed finances with sing... by TMWNN on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @07:03PM (#43338058)
I've done that over the last several years, building an order-tracking/accounting system for myself in Excel. (Inventory and fulfillment is handled by commercial software.) I'm mulling over whether to move to a "real" database.

I'm on a Mac so can't move to Access. I've thought about FileMaker, but am considering Panorama X because unlike FileMaker it reportedly allows undoing almost anything, while FileMaker is like the typical database in a record commit not being undoable.

(Yes, I know that not allowing such is good practice, which is why I am not a database admin.)

I've heard good things about Panorama X, and it has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost or conversion time, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?

Re:New Zealand's $16B health dept managed finances with sing... by rrr_oh_man on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @05:59AM (#43341473)
These days I default to Google Sheets for almost anything.

App Script is quite powerful and easier to write and understand than VBA imho.