On Thu, 2011-08-04 at 15:57 -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: (intended content snipped) > > <vent> > A good thread topic for PLUG-TALK is why those in the Microsoft business > world try to use spreadsheets as databases. Well, the why is pretty obvious, > but retraining them is very difficult. IMO, spreadsheets should be > restricted to the financial people; everyone else learns how to use a > database system. > </vent>
It's because a spreadsheet is a nice general-purpose tool, and if you have 20 things that you need as a "database" it's a lot easier to set up on a spreadsheet that you know, rather than a database program that you don't. It comes under "Tim's Rule of Complex Solutions" -- any tool that is good at dealing with a Really Complex Problem is going to have a huge initial learning curve, which means that nobody who's an amateur at solving that sort of problem is going to bother with learning the tool. Instead, they'll use a tool that has a low step-up cost for the initial problem, and then stick themselves (and the rest of the world) with the really steep curve to add complexity to it. Files vs. lathes, BASIC (or Java) vs. C or C++, shovels vs. bulldozers -- whatever the problem, there's a quick & easy way to do a small job that scales up really poorly, and an efficient way to do a huge job that scales down really poorly. Spreadsheet programs just exacerbate the problem in that while they're really good for things that can be easily organized in tabular form, you can wedge other problems into them if you hit them with a big enough hammer, and 'everybody' knows how to use them. -- Tim Wescott www.wescottdesign.com Control & Communications systems, circuit & software design. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
