Re: Spreadsheets ; Can we do better?
- Posted by ryanj Jun 06, 2015
- 1724 views
I have always thought spreadsheets were useful for quick calculations of a series of data, but businesses tend to use them for too many things rather than have a programmer design a custom solution. They end up doing too much to make the spreadsheet do stuff it isn't efficient at, such as manually creating new rows to handle another month's worth of data and manually expanding data ranges of formulas and copying formatting and stuff. Of course, with all that messing around, someone is going to screw it up and break some formulas or formatting, and then someone has to fix it, over and over again. (That was usually me doing all that work...and no matter how much i begged and pleaded with people to just enter the numbers and not touch anything else, someone always managed to totally screw things up.) I have always wished for something that makes it really really easy to build a nice quality database GUI that is id10t-proof.
You would think Access would do just that. But, i found it was quite lacking. One time, years ago, i replaced an Excel spreadsheet that was used for several years' worth of equipment outage and maintenance logs with an Access database, which was slightly better. But i hated how users were forced to have an annoying set of toolbars and a multi-child-window interface that can only flip between records. Also, there was no easy way to make it synchronize in real-time between multiple users. So, i used Visual Basic for Applications to hack together a GUI that ran on top of Access, which evolved into a pretty useful application that included a workplace schedule, contact list, and other views. I could set different permissions for different users. It even had a read-only viewer that the higher-ups could run to view current job/outage status. I used a trick to send messages to all clients, so they could refresh whenever data changed. People could even send instant messages to other people. It was quite sophisticated for an Access/VBA program. It tended to crash and lock the entire database, so i even had to figure out a trick to send a message to all other remote clients to close so the database could be unlocked and repaired/compacted. Eventually, I ported all the code over to Visual Basic 6.0 so i could compile EXE files to distribute to all of the users, but it still connected to an MS Access database file on a file server. That was much more efficient and reliable. But, the whole time i was working on it, i hated how complex VB syntax was compared to Euphoria.
It's amazing how many businesses and organizations mess with a spreadsheet instead of developing a custom database that can save many many man-hours. But, i supposed it's difficult or expensive to find a programmer to write it.
