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ryukoposting 3 months ago

I'll never understand why more devs don't learn Excel. Yeah, it's ugly. It's also the only thing you know you can use to develop a tool, slap one file into an email, send it to whoever needs the tool, and they'll immediately know exactly how to open it and use it. No 5-step lists of instructions, no dependency hell, no need to subvert the IT department. Excel is the lowest-friction platform for developing internal tools, period.

grogenaut 3 months ago | parent | next [-]

We use sheets all the time at work for all sorts of processes, essentially an internal tool. But it doesn't really even need code, the human is the code. I had to strongly suggest to some of our TPMs and actually a principal in the last year that no they didn't need a tool, they just needed a spreadsheet. But this is so low code that people likely don't even think of it as a low code solution, it's just a spreadsheet.

That said other than managing and sorting lists of work to do, I break the limits on sheets and excel all the time so for anything with customer scale data I can't use it.

nickjj 3 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep, even the most basic knowledge such as knowing how to do math on a few cells can be useful to build things. It's really good for one off internal tools to do comparisons.

For the first 5 years of selling courses I handled affiliate payouts by sorting and summing rows in a spreadsheet. It only took 5 minutes once a month. I eventually automated what I used to do manually with a script that reads the CSV file because I like coding and it was fun to me, plus I wanted to remove one point of human error.

analog31 3 months ago | parent | prev [-]

At my workplace, they do, for all of those reasons.