The Package That Never Grew Up: Microsoft Excel

Lesson 1: A Spreadsheet is Not a Database

Microsoft Excel is a strange little package, and that has never really grown up. It is was created in a world of DOS and Windows 95, and still has the same old back-end. It worked well in the 20th Century, but should now not be used for anything simpler than your tax returns. Its integration with other software harks back to the 1980s, along with terrible security and non-existant access control. If you think that Excel is wonderful in corporate level applications, perhaps you should stop reading this article?

Look what happens when I save a file named “test01” to a different place than another file with the same name:

Excel is great for doing little forms and in quick calculations, but for doing anything more complex, you move to Python and a proper programming language. And you soon learn that it has a horrible way of concatenating strings and that you have a limit in the string you can create for each cell with CONCAT():