You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel. Samsung’s Austin fab, at least circa 2020-ish, was generating machine labels with it. These are paper cards, roughly 2” x 4”, which carry the following information:

* Machine name / number

* Owning technician’s name, shift, photo, and phone number

* Owning engineer’s name, shift, photo, and phone number

My team had something like 250 machines spread across 4 shifts. We had to redo cards anytime we gained or lost someone on any team, which often included rebalancing the workload. Luckily, someone had made an Excel macro that connected to a MSSQL DB that had employee information (IIRC, it didn’t have confidential information like pay in it; I think it was used for generating badges), pulled all of the required fields, and automatically filled the template. Send them to the printer, cut them apart, and go place them.

My contribution while there was to implement a crude pathing optimization that tried to assign contiguous machines to a given technician, to minimize the amount they had to walk for weekly checks. It kinda worked; better than nothing, anyway.

>You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.

I've never seen a better explanation of the tool than that one sentence

This should have either been a Word template that used mail merge to insert the data into fields or an Access form.

  Checklist:
   #1 Are you doing calculations?
    Yes: Use a spreadsheet
    No: Use another tool

> You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel. Samsung’s Austin fab, at least circa 2020-ish, was generating machine labels with it.

Generating machine labels seems useful, but I don't think that feels particularly horrifying or amazing. Just like, yeah, that's something it should be able to do.

A former coworker was previously employed in high finance in London, his entire job was keeping the rickety lattice of interlinked spreadsheets across the company working and alive. People would type in a number in one spreadsheet, and after several hours, another number would appear via the lattice in a more influential spreadsheet.

The company made money, so it worked, but he swears is caused him to start prematurely balding. Maybe a convenient excuse, but also plausible.

> You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.

A friend of mine writes all of their correspondence in it.