Actually, that's just about right. Well, except for the part about the photo. We all know they would have actually used a webcam. One of those first-generation ones that has a 30x20 resolution...

Bravo, Rory! Well done! :)

Sure, it might be wierd, but the sad thing is, I'm sure that this very sequence of events has happened in some marketing department, somewhere. Just another reason why I'm glad to be a coder, and not in marketing.

Weird? Yes. True? Absolutely.

Your drawings are like "Dilbert" as seen through the eyes of a semi-retarded schizophrenic. You're a funny guy, Rory. And weird.

Yeah... Well, I think it's best to just be yourself.

True? Just this past Thursday. The only thing I can think of right now ( today has been another *bad* day) worse than being in marketing is being a coder supporting marketing. Oh, wait...that's me...no WONDER I feel like this. I need drugs.

Ow.... I think I just had a hernia!!! Think I could send the bill to your marketing department?

Sorry about that, Daniel. The art's really bad - I should warn people when I'm putting these things up...

Hooboy thats funny. Funny Funny Funny! But funny in that "I've been there before" way. Bravo Rory, Bravo. I'm going to be chuckling all the way to work now :-)

Thanks, Dan - I'm glad I finally posted something that got a comment out of you - It's like the good old days :)

Ooh ooh! What if you take this Excel "database",
populate it with EXTREMELY critical data, and
put it on a share drive with no protection that
is accessible to a constantly changing pool of
people from another country who change formats,
add/delete rows and columns, and leave it open
when they go home .. thus preventing anybody else
from accessing it until they come back to work ...
Wouldn't That Be Sooo Cool?!

Hey, that's SOOO weird that you said that. We do that where I work. I think it came out of someone's DFSS project to do it this way. And I bet someone got a promotion for this brilliant idea.

Tig -

1) I wish I had thought to put that in there.

2) I'm sorry for what you're going through.

Bubba -

It isn't *that* weird ;) This problem is disturbingly widespread.

I *wish* it were totally weird. That might indicate that it were kind of rare. The unfortunate truth, of course, is very much the opposite...

Joke's on him, it's not a supported camera in iPhoto. :)

Hey, let's make each one of these steps work on DIFFERENT versions of Windows too, and require a driver installation every step of the way.

Oh my god, I don't work with a Rory, but I am pretty sure you work with the same people I do. Have used a pseudonym same way Scott Adams does. Who are you? Is this Matt? I just can't figure out how you finish your work and have time for cartoons! Maybe a camera in our office?

He he he. Very funny Rory! I'd like to make one minor addition. I have a client that wants that Excel database to be available on the internet and will need to make updates to it once a month. DOH!

My god, you've been spying on our meetings.

thank the gods, we got rid of our woman who kept her databases in word. I must be one of the few people in the world whose ENTIRE office can now use access/sql.

only yesterday someone in my office tried that. after a week they came to me to see if i had any ideas lol. it was done within 20 minutes. how do these people get a job anyway? is there a department in every office that hires 50 dumb people and 4 with common sense?

I worked for an oil company, as a student year out, maintaining a 'set' of link spread sheets which did all of the refinery planning. I was paid 12K for the year and slogged my guts out on these. The system became so important when I was leaving I had to handover to an IT support contract firm, which charged 15K just to be on other end of a telephone.

The crowning moment was after I'd managed to get it to compile damned reports, they then asked for some clip art to make it look less dull!

Should have called myself 'some mug'.

this is exactly what would go on at this one national credit card corporation where i used to work. then because the marketing people weren't forced to spend the time reconciling their own data and had nothing to do, they decided to hold a fashion show.

yeah, so like, i don't work there anymore. my limits for ridiculousness had been grossly exceeded.

(yes that is a legitimate English word.)

Could be worse... the first 3 years I worked at my current place of employment, the bug tracking system was an internally-produced hacked-together perl script which saved the bugs for a given project as text files.

Needless to say, large projects with large numbers of bugs (like, 7000 ish) and large numbers of engineers (circa 250) trying to perform searches managed to grind a monolithically powerful Sun server into a 486DX2....

Not that an exc(rement)el sheet would have been better, though.

Aaaaah, the perils of data!!! Too funny....and too true...

"...the bug tracking system was an internally-produced hacked-together perl script"

"hacked-together," eh?

As opposed to what... well-designed and brilliantly coded perl scripts? :)

So, Rory, does anyone give you crap for having the same name as the chic from the Gilmore girls?

Actually, for a bunch of simple database applications, Excel may often be preferred to Access. Sure, if you need multiple tables, multiple users, transaction logging, etc., then Access or some other database product is the way to go. But for a single-table single-user application? At least as of Office 97, I found that Excel's ability to easily put out
nicely formatted compact and readable reports beat Access all to hell. After a couple of times dumping my Access database of test results to Excel to format so it was readable, it occurred to me that if I kept the database in Excel in the first place, I wouldn't have to keep reformatting it...

Most of the other developers I've worked with have wound up using Excel for tracking stuff like that, also. Of course, if you are primarily developing DB applications with SQL day to day, you may find it more natural to keep working that way even for the simple stuff. But it's definitely not just marketing
using Excel databases.

Gilmore girls? people watch that show? I will never, never, never come to call Excel a database. Its like seeing rosanne bar and going 'Damn! she is fine!'

Once I had to convert a Lotus spreadsheet application into a database at a bank. The primary motivation for this project? The spreadsheet had filled up. This was in the days before you could link spreadsheets. I guess now they would just leave it in Lotus. Or move it to Excel.

Dave, I've been in these same situations. The problem is not someone using Excel to keep a list of things like bugs (I've done that myself to track a client's list of items), but expecting to query and report on dynamic data.

I also, Rory, I think you give them too much credit for coming up with the digital camera solution - truth is they would have hired a photographer to come in and take a pic, taken the negatives to Walgreens and gotten tehm redeveloped and put on a DVD at the same time!

Hah, hah.
This reminds me of a time......

....it was 1985. The newly minted MBA marketing genius was demonstrating his "favorite business tool," a "decision matrix."

My reply:

http://www.geocities.com/morris_johns/ ToExcelOrNot.html

He he he.

Use a VB program to load word docs with data tables with access data by pressing a button.

My first real job, they had Wang dedicated word processors, then the PC revolution came, and they all discovered Lotus123 and typed text into cells until they reached the max (255 char's as I recall). So all paragraphs were size limited.
This honestlty continued (in the quality control department no less) until they switched to Windows and Excel, but then they still did the same thing for another 6 months until forced to learn Word.
Company now extinct.

You missed the part about how they need XML to do it, so let's buy a book.

You are all computer nerds!!!!

If you have a life, then what are you doing here?

Scarily close to the Truth Rory, except that you missed the bit where they try to insert the image into PowerPoint so they can present it to the coders. And then call IS because they can't figure out how to do it. Powerpoint, as every marketing graduate(?)knows is THE most essential piece of software in the world. And, therefore, the most difficult to learn...

So true!!!

I took no offense to your story and cartoon because it's basically true. However, I'm one of those rare marketing dept folks who tries his best to give folks like you what they want and I am often just ignored. The two attitudes from the technical folks here at my company are:

- "Don't bother explaining anything to them. They are idiots. It's easier to just fix what they mess up because they'll never remember anyway."

- "Why do we even have a marketing dept.? Things would run so much more smoothly if they were eliminated." (someone at my company actually said this and had no response when they were asked how the company would continue to earn revenue and pay their salary if no one knew about our products).

<Observation>Funny pictures, but where's the ones of a technical guy, providing his insight rather than silently ridiculing those that do speak up?</Observation>

OK, so these folks are technically illiterate to the degree that is hilarious to us folks who invested their high school and college education, and in fact much of adult life, to pursuit of excellence in the computer field.

The marketing folks have skills in other areas, depth and sophistication of which, being not as clear to us as our own, we tend to diminish much like they do with respect of complexity of the technical challenges we face, and the prowess required to solve them.

So we could choose to retract into our mollusk shell of a computer geek and only be really effective when people and situations mold itself into conformance with our narrow "interface" requirements, ridiculing everything else. The organizations who have these people know they need them, but the attitude towards them is that of a necessary evil - not a

... Or we could choose to step out of the shell and devote a real, ongoing effort to finding points of contact with these non-technical folks, gradually allowing us to convey technical issues in ways that resonate with them. This would ultimately allow us to "sell" the team on adopting better practices and investing in building higher quality, longer-term solutions than they would in lieu of your insight.

Your choice. The latter gets you more respect and pays better.

I kid you not - I was hired at a mortgage company to replace their "Customer Database". When I asked to see their current tools, they showed me Microsoft Outlook. They were using the contact manager in Outlook to store all their customer information (correspondence notes, history, payment info). The biggest problem was that they had no consistent way to enter this information.. it was basically "click around until you get a blinking cursor and then start typing.. ".

I wound up writing a custom export script that sucked the data out and massaged it well enough to get it into a MySQL database.. then I just build a front end in PHP and presto! Now the whole office can see all the customer information with nothing more than a web browser. They were simply amazed.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

-- Quangdog

It's indeed a question of what do we prefer:
-looks and ease-of-use
or
-consistency and robustness
It's hard to combine all four traits in one package. Since marketing people prefer looks and ease of use they will prefer Excel. Developers like consistency and robustness so they will prefer a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). The two different species can put their energy in arguing, making fun of the situation or develop a solution. Guess what we did?
We used the Access TRANSFORM statement to generate a pivot table >> then we show the pivot table in an Excel sheet. Take a look >>
http://www.magazijnbeheer.be/blog/articles/nytro/infosheets.html#profit
To add some icing to the cake we abused all the layout capabilities of Excel:
-fonts
-background colors
-borders
-totals
Guess what >> the marketing people love it and the developers love the 'awes' from the marketeers. Everybody is happy and yes the marketeers can send the Excelsheet as an email :)

Kris - what are you on, don't you have any work to do

I once had to deal with a client who was still using Wordstar to store contats in 2000!!!!!

Wasted time on the whole issue

Loved the illustrations, and it was all true. What is just as funny, speaking as a graphic designer in an oil company, is when someone gives you an Excel sheet crammed with figures and scans. Then you are told to make a "sexy" poster out of it.

I think the UK should have more lenient gun laws.

Sheer genius. I have to deal with this stuff regularly. You've captured the essence of my life.

Weird? Yes. Oh how true it is and yet so very funny. Keep up the good work.

This reminds me of a friend of mine - who was a non-techy working for a company that arranged conferences. One department produced a monthly report, and as part of their procedure they would produce a Word document, with some Excel data pasted into it.

In order to actually carry this step out, they printed the word document, as well as the data from the spreadsheet, cut out the spreadsheet data with a craft knife, then pasted it to the word document, and photocopied it. They didn't see why they should change their procedures when she pointed out the possible inefficiencies that it entailed.

I kid not.

The next stage, of course, is that the techie replies that the image in Excel is 'unreadable' meaning machine unreadable. The marketeers then conclude that they need a higher resolution scan of the information. This leads to the 97000 USD annual scanning contract being given to Johnson's friend, Tarquin, who runs a 'multimedia agency' called 'Fried Black Pepper' to provide a 67000 DPI scan of the data, delivered on an Apple formatted SyQuest cartridge.

What do you mean it's still not readable.

OMG- This is so real.

The next step of course, would be to automate the process. Making sure to page the developer any time that new data (scanned image) has entered the database.

I think I know some of those people!

I'm often getting emails from customers containing 100kb Word document attachments. When I open up the stupid Word document, I find that it contains a half-dozen lines of text cut from a flat text log file. Why wouldn't they just paste the text directly into the email...? Duh.

You forgot about the people who use Excel as a relational database -- you know, Merge Cells? *shiver*

For the record: I'm guilty of having worked as senior marketing twat for a number of unfeasibly large companies.

I can personally attest to the terrifying accuracy of this 'process of discovery' - having found myself, on more than one ocassion, in the midst of discussions <i>exactly</i> like this one.

My all time favourite was the one about the CEO's assistant who had printed and filed copies of all his email. Cretinous, oui - yet not all that unusual. But it gets better...

We'd just implemented a document management system right across the corporate network. The CEO wanted all his old email indexed so that he'd be able to search on it. But the efficient EA had deleted all his old email (as one is supposed to do).

No problem! They realised they still had all the printed copies - so they set up a process to scan and OCR the entire archive.

Doubly utterly cretinous? Yes - but wait, there's more...

The company this happened at was a software developer. And guess what kind of software we developed?

Yup - you guessed it. The document management system we were installing was our own product!

I pointed out that we could always retrieve the old email from the backup tapes. Then headed back to my office to polish up me C.V.

Damn that was funny and amazingly enough some users do think like that - why do god punish us IT people like that.

Is this supposed to be funny?

I guess you would call this a reality comix?

Yes, it is amusing. It was playing in my head as a South Park animation, with the same kind of little frantic voices....

Hint, hint...

<Observation>Funny pictures, but where's the ones of a technical guy, providing his insight rather than silently ridiculing those that do speak up?</Observation>

We do that because once management finds out you're smart, they'll do anything to push you down:-)

Oh, that was too familiar...Do you work with me?
I actually had a boss who printed and filed his e-mail...but, then, he was a lawyer who thought that Puerto Rico was a foreign country.

Also, why is everyone so terrified of Access? It's the simplest thing to use! Everyone wants to use paper for tracking, not Access. I'm beginning to loose my hair.

That's the funniest damn thing I've seen all night :)

well I really had to Go to the bathroom laughing. O my God that was..... No words to explain cannot dare to Read again

We sent an Access database out to a translator. When we got the contents of the tables back as a Word document we contacted the translator and stressed thay were ment to translate the text in place and return the Access database to us.

A week or so later we got the contents back as an Excel file!

After reflection we decided to let it go and spent some time manualy fitted the data back into the database. We were scared that if we asked again it would turn up as a PowerPoint file.

Why don't they just "out source"? Courier all the images to me here in India and I will type the data in excel. All this for 10% of the cost!!

This is so, so sad.

My client just emailed this link to me. I told her it would be "no problem" to write an Access database that everyone can use for the project. No-one (including me) had ever used Access before so we all went our various ways and the cartoon is SO true, but you missed out the bit that says that Outlook always deletes Access attachments (but not Word or Excel) in case it has a nasty inside it.

I love Lotus Approach and I have a photo of Bill Gates on my dartboard now

Say Bubba, did your spreadsheet contain several columns with both numbers and numbers as text aligned right? And was the font-size 12pt and in superscript? 'cos if it did I think I know the company you work(ed) for :-)

I have a word to say against such way of thinking. Guys, you have to understand that if managment, marketing or whatever I normally call a CLIENT understood computers and data as good as we do, they'll never throw their money to pay us our not so modest fees or salaries. To say that this people are stupid just because they don't understand your field of expertise is very stupid itself. You have to finaly realize that the reason we exist are these people and their ideas. If I had to choose which one to kill between 1000 developers and a businessman I choose the businessman.

ooops that was very stupid from myself. I ment I kill the devlopers, of course ;)

<<2nd Chapter>>
[Inwhich lothesome IT worker gets lamblasted]
"What do you mean 'you can't parse that file?, it's in Excel, damn it!'"

Heheh that's awesome =)

Except for one thing.
Using jpeg for that kind of images is almost as bad as, say, using Excel as a database .. err .. ;)

Try PNG .. it won't get as blurred ..

Cheers,
-R

Burp

This is spot on. Only thing missing is the blaze of color which assaults you every time you open a marketing spreadsheet.

I think marketing managers judge figures produced by underlings in Excel sheets not based on the actual numbers (that would take too long and be too accurate) but rather on the amount and occurence of colors used to mark the rows and cells.

Of course trying to explain to people who've spent hours coloring a huge spreadsheet that they can't sort by color is not much fun (although by about the third time they do it, any sympathy I may have had with them has long since departed).

< P-sssss!! * sizzle * !! >

Arrgh! My eyes. Teh goggles, they do nothing!!

Can we get a print-quality version of this?
I need it on my office door.

Jolly Roger: Actually, you can sort by color. Heh.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/colorsort.htm

Defiler:
" Can we get a print-quality version of this?
I need it on my office door."

....just take a photo of it!!:-)

i haven't seen anything so gay in my life

Once had a marketing client who kept a large contact list in Adobe Pagemaker (the easier to print on label sheets)....and wanted to produce reports, selects, etc.!?!

Arrrrgh..........

I dont get it. I thought Excel WAS a database?!

too effin' funny.... this was linked from craigslist.com in response to a question I asked about "How is Access better than Excel, and why?" I now realize that I don't know enough about either to render a real opinion so I should just bury my nose in my little project, take my lumps and move on. Either way, something will be produced and it will not look anything like what I had expected it to. Pfffffffffftttttt.

Nothing is as bad as Powerpoint Hell! Just imagine the poor smuck whose got to take all of those BS marketing ideas and put them on slides - oh! and make sure there are plenty of pretty colors!

I see this stuff everyday and the worse part is no matter how simply you explain it, they don't understand that there is a time and place for Excel! How the hell do these people get their jobs?!?

Absolutely spot on. Non-techs in business are what was wrong with 20th century business (Enron, parmalat etc). Put the decision making ability where the knowledge and know-how is, not with a handful of balding suit halfwits struggling to feed the teenager before it finally leaves home and takes its smack habit somewhere else.

My favorite comic strip of all time is a Dilbert strip where PHB tells Dilbert that he (Dilbert) will be doing some "cross-training" with the marketing department. In the last frame Dilbert is standing in front of the marketing department reading the banner they have hanging over the entry way. It reads, "Welcome to Marketing. Two drink minimum." ;-P (wink, stick out tongue)

i just want to know is excel a datatbase

Yep, I've seen this, too. The main problem, of course, is that people don't seem to know when they're out of their depth and need to ask for help. The other side of the coin is people with the proper depth who won't help. I goes both ways.

Analyst said:
_This is so, so sad.

_My client just emailed this link to me. I _told her it would be "no problem" to write an _Access database that everyone can use for the _project. No-one (including me) had ever used _Access before so we all went our various ways _and the cartoon is SO true, but you missed _out the bit that says that Outlook always _deletes Access attachments (but not Word or _Excel) in case it has a nasty inside it.
_
_I love Lotus Approach and I have a photo of _Bill Gates on my dartboard now
--------------------------------------------

Try putting the attachement in a .zip file. My company blocks lots more attachments than it needs to, so we have to do this pretty often.

While Excel was not designed as database program it has become the most used program in the world for doing simple database work.

This adds to the already existing problem of spreadsheet risk in terms of financial reporting

The Fragile Last Mile of BI: Spreadsheet Risk & Fraud Analysis

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/bi/spreadsheet/

File->Export->Save Type As Excel Spreadsheet 97-2003->SAVE!!!

To continue the story

... they email the scan, but it's too big so the mailserver blocks it. Then they use Stuffit on the Mac to compress the scan, because even though Stuffit Deluxe and even Mac OS X can make Zip files, the Mac users don't understand what a Zip file is. But the demo copy on the Mac has expired, so they purchase a full copy, wait for it to arrive and install it. Then the PCs can't understand Stuffit files, so they purchase *another* copy for the PC...

To continue the story

... they email the scan, but it's too big so the mailserver blocks it. Then they use Stuffit on the Mac to compress the scan, because even though Stuffit Deluxe and even Mac OS X can make Zip files, the Mac users don't understand what a Zip file is. But the demo copy on the Mac has expired, so they purchase a full copy, wait for it to arrive and install it. Then the PCs can't understand Stuffit files, so they purchase *another* copy for the PC...

What I draw from all the mess is that simple and beauty is utopic in IT.

wow, going on a year old and still rockin!

This is a true story, I have been suffering from it for years.

One of the many employees started using a spreadsheet to store his data and make some reports. The other employees liked it and started using the same sheet, each on their computer.

After some hacks like drawn above, they finally handed the thing to the IT department. Great ! IT didn't have much budget, so they just put everything into MS Access. But the data was growing quickly.

They had to extend it, so they used part of the budget to move the data in MS SQL Server, not the interface, still in MS Access.

Then everything moved to Oracle... and still growing.

But the "database" is still pretty much ONE HUGE table with everything in it and data is copied to other tables to do some processing.

Redesign the database ? Why ? It was designed when we made it in Excel.

The final joke:
The application IT created... it has to output the data to MS Excel for further abuse...

You've forgotten the firm that won't pony up the money for access - and then wonders (read infers you've screwed up) why excel seems to be struggling so. Then, years later, hiring a consultant (whose hourly rate is significantly higher than the cost of buying the licenses in the first place) to come in and fix "your" mistakes. Bonus points for explaining to opposing counsel why your discovery responses aren't all they could be. Double bonus for explaining it to a Judge.

This is an actual email we received today:
===========================================

Some of you know me, and some of you I have received your name from others as people who have knowledge of Visual Basic, or Excel Macros. I'm looking for a quick way of accomplishing some automation, and I think I've got my layout figured out pretty well, but I'm not sure how to do the coding. Anyone who has input, it would be greatly appreciated. If you know of other VB Experts, I'd appreciate it if you would let me know who they are, or send this on.


I'm working within Excel, and we have created a "form" which stores quite a number of datapoints. There are approximately 75 of these forms, all in separate workbooks. We want to do a highlevel rollup of approximately 20 datapoints from within these sheets, into 1 worksheet. I would like to automate this so I can put in a link to a workbook and then have Excel go and create links to the rest of the datapoints. When it is done gathering the datapoints, we will put an "x" in the final column so it doesn't regenerate the links for each form everytime the macro is run.

If anyone can offer insight, I would greatly appreciate it, thank you!

Muhahahahaah

you idiot!!!! If it were that easy (general user) then why didnt you DO it or GOOGLE it!!
Stupid users!!!!

HA! The Excel->Access-SQL Server->Oracle migration path described by somebody above is indeed the way it **SHOULD** happen. I have beat my head bloody trying to explain to non-techies who were trying to 'get' the difference between Excel/Access (spreadsheet/database). What is so hard about "each sheet in a spreadsheet is the same thing as a table in the database"?????

Funny and scarily accurate. But your comments about the Excel features can cut both ways. Observe...

I once assigned a simple project to a new hire: develop a utility that would calculate the concentrations of a parent and daughter products (chemicals) in a known decay chain. The inputs were the initial concentration of the parent and the assumed decay constants for each daughter. Since this was for in-house use only, it didn't need to be fancy; should have taken a couple of hours at most. Four days later newbie -- a CS grad -- turned in the completed project. It was extremely fancy, with a splash screen, colorful input tabs, buttons, and the like. But when you ran it, it actually reported increasing amounts of the parent product with each time step.

Conclusion: this guy was eager to show off his programming prowess, but he had no clue that his program revealed an appalling lack of knowledge of the real world situation he was trying to model.

We have 20,000 users and two giant mainframes. The production system has 2000 DB2 tables ofclient data, the Development system has 300 miniature test copies of the Prod database.
The Database Admins, not being programmers and unwilling to admit that relational databases were invented by mathematically minded genius programmers, not DBAs like themselves, insist on storing the metadata about these tables in ... you guessed it, Excel spreadsheets. Can Rory draw another face but with horns, a tail behind, and to topit off, a clown hat?

Rory,

That cartoon is hilarious. And so true !!!
Thank you for the deep belly laugh !!

- Joseba

"people from another country who change formats,
add/delete rows and columns.."

and then save it in unicode extended format and then give it to someone that has to convert it for a real database using Perl in UN*X.. *sigh*

Also just read the Spolsky anthology. Bit of a late entrant in the thread, but hey, Rory, you're in good company in that book!

My contribution: Recently created a contact database for a company where the raw data was in Word tables, formatted as mailing stickers. Oh, and there were multiple files, corresponding to different mailing lists, with a plethora of duplicated but subtly differing entries of course.

Once the entries were cleaned up, one could then perform the joyful task of going through data in Excel, bits of paper, and people's memories to get the actual DB up to the "amateur Access" level. But hey, that's a step up...

Hey ho! I use Macs & PCs as a designer; I've taught MS Office to 16-84 yr olds; I've seen managers type their letters in Excel cos they think it's easier than Word; I've had people embed their company logos in Word & Excel cos they don't understand how to email the logo itself; I've had artwork sent to me in Excel and Powerpoint (not as bad as you make out); and people shouting at me cos you can't (couldn't?) print a Publisher document as a 4-colour separation.

I blame Microsoft. If they hadn't coined the phrase "intuitive software" back in the early 80s people would be sent on courses by their managers and would maybe come away knowing the difference between Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. I still prefer FileMaker Pro for data anyway.

Having said all this common sense stuff I loved the original cartoons; even my non-techy husband was laughing! And being a bit of a techy myself I still get hysterical at the difficulties people put in their own way. I'm just way too lazy: I'll even redo someone's artwork just cos it offends me that they use masks & clipping paths & transparencies & ... when you just need to change one shape and stick in on the top layer in Illustrator!! Hey, I'm a Virgo - what do you expect?

I remember a contract job I had once... They insisted they had a database and just needed me to get the information from it. I asked them to send it, and got 1.5GB of Excel spreadsheets on CD, each one of them with a sheet called "DATABASE".

They couldn't understand why the cost was severely adjusted upward.

It hurts because it's true! :(

It's not just in the number-crunching/coding world either. Ask someone in the world of print how they feel when someone describes a Word document as "camera-ready".

Where do you work ppl ?! It' s weird that your clients use excell as a database, very little clients use to do that.
Anyway, I think you have to ask you first if you are big enough to have serious clients or big clients, I actually work with the USA medical system (developping) and I can assure that you don't see Excell as databases.

How about:
1. Using lots of formatting and colors for no reason other than distract from the data and use all the ink in your printer.

2. Highlighting columns so that if you do print without checkin, you print 100 extra, non-data, pages of highlight.

3. Using complex nested if's because you don't have any real math skills.

4. Averaging "averages" without weight.

5. Finally, doing 1-4 above and password protecting the worksheet so no-one else can fix it because you for some reason think that someone will try to either "steal" your work of art or change one of your mistakes!

Hey, how did we get the interest and sales leads to make the money to pay for all ofus to spend time writing these messages?? Oh yea, MARKETING!!! Who trained these idiots in using software tothe point that they cant tell the difference between a document and a database? Oh yea, the IT department! So we have idots with no math or programming skills being trained by other idiots with no teaching skills

When people assume knowledge they do not have and underestimate the complexity of a task, comedy is often the result. In this case, the marketing people assumed they can manage and manipulate data. If the IT people assumed they could do marketing, the results would be equally funny for the same reason.

When low-cost manufacturing makes it easy for anyone to buy a hydraulic lift, there will be a few people who think they can overhaul an automatic transmission. Those of us smart enough to leave that task for a mechanic will be doing most of the laughing.

When using the Image Control in Excel I have no problem opening a Tagged Image File Format,(tif file) but when I use Forms in Access, it tells me to large of a file. HEEEEEELP

My job at the moment is to take data from 4 people and make a web interface with a single SQL Server table in the background.

3 people use Excel, 1 uses Access.

The columns/fields have no consistency either in name or in content. A date column might have a specific day, or it will say "week 9". Or it might say "skipped", "sent back to customer", or any number of non-date type information.

The number of columns/fields is different for each person because they only keep track of information they care about.

This will be so awesome, it can't possibly fail!

that's one of the funniest friggin things i've ever seen. you should be writing for the comics if you can keep coming up with stuff like that.

I'VE SEEN IT DAMMIT. Ask them for data, they send you a friggin image <suppress urge to kill>

I've also seen people try to use Excel as a flowchart program by filling in the lines on the cells. aaaargh.

It's so damned true. :D

this site is totally rubbish!

sexy girl

So true, only people with no idea use access as a db to begin with. Nice work Roy..

It's funny, very funny and, of course, true. But these are people trying to do a job guided by management who once looked at a word-processor.

I have every sympathy with them. I'm also a contractor and get lots of work from them.

The IT world would be better off without users, but the world would be better off without IT.

It's funny but true. Most people working in the the department I support are using EXCEL and spreadsheets for their daily work. They don't trust ERP and applications......

Alan Dean

[Humour] Excel as a database

Microsoft, open source, and saying grace

re: HTML email: friend or foe?

a funny

Outwardly Normal 2

Unfortunate Likeness to Reality

Unfortunate Likeness to Reality

JoelOnSoftware Finds Rory

colin charles blog &raquo; OOo 680m22

Strike me down with lightning, a bus, a piano falling out the sky, anything....please?

Komiksy

Been blogging for a year - Forgotten why I even started...

beyond this place, behind the stars &raquo; Excel as a database.

Links to essays in Best Software Writing I

The Best Software Writing I

The Importance of People Knowing How to Use Tools

Careful what you ask your customers

You gotta getta geek

You gotta getta geek

You gotta getta geek

You gotta getta geek

You gotta getta geek

You gotta getta geek

PingBack from http://angryaussie.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/how-to-really-screw-up-a-buy-or-build-decision/

PingBack from http://nuytsia.wordpress.com/2006/09/13/idioteque/

In general, it's best to place the printout on a wooden table before taking a photo.

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/1/72344/ShowThread.aspx

PingBack from http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/post/funny-excel-comics/

Where I work, they would get to about screen 3 and then throw up thier hands and "hire a consultant" who would charge them 10 grand and only half do the job, so that a year later when they finnally figured out it was not finnished he could then charge them another 5 grand for enchancements...

That was sooo true.. that it hurts.

PingBack from http://www.fahlstad.se/2006/12/05/excel-as-a-database/

George Bush's grammar coach said:

"If the IT people assumed they could do marketing, the results would be equally funny for the same reason"

I'm sure you're right, but how many times have you seen marketing people attempt to do a bit of IT work and how many times have you seen IT people try a bit of marketing work without proper training? I suspect much more of the former than the latter.

You must continue this storyline to when they present the Excel document to the developers... I can't wait to see what funniness ensues!  Thanks for the great laugh!

Hmm.. I smell a series coming!

-Silx
http://techstuff.goboardz.com

I really worked at a place that had the price lists in the wordprocessing program and the Letters in the spreadsheet program.  They also had a BIG book that they wrote the stuff that should of been in a database... did they use the database?  Yep, the box made a great book end for the files!  AAHHH!!
So, I totally agree with the cartoon, And as a storey board... it's great! expresses the feels perfectly

They would need everything to be wed-based too.  Because as we all know, web-based applications are inherently superior to all other kinds of applications...

PingBack from http://andreas.materns.com/wordpress/?p=263

PingBack from http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/12/05/excel-as-a-database/

You know, I’ve had situations like this many a time, except once: I was working for a small company that builds fire trucks (really!) and my position was “Marketing Coordinator/I.T. Specialist.” In other words, both marketing and database development were… um… me.

Somehow, that seemed to work. ;-)

Do you have any idead how many times I've gone through this EXACT scenario? On the receiving end.  
Thank God for Visual Foxpro.  My instructions to the clients (the equivalent of your marketing departmet) have begun to go along the lines of "just give me what you have/use. Don't try to make it "better" for me. I can sort it out just fine."

Because, as we all know that the WORST thing you can have is a client that, when it comes to database format, wants to be "helpful".

Danke an Herrn S aus M fr dieses Kleinod. Lasst euch nicht von den schrecklichen Zeichnungen abschrecken.