{"id":9638,"date":"2011-06-03T10:05:54","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9638"},"modified":"2011-06-03T10:05:54","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:05:54","slug":"the-right-software-tool-for-the-job-excel-is-not-a-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/03\/the-right-software-tool-for-the-job-excel-is-not-a-database\/","title":{"rendered":"The right software tool for the job: Excel is not a database"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it&#8217;s awkward to do? I&#8217;ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters &mdash; and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. The old adage seems to still apply in the software world: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s apparently not just small companies that suffer from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2011\/06\/03\/london_2012_olympics_cultural_events_excel\/\" target=\"_blank\">this sort of problem<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world&#8217;s population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation&#8217;s entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.<\/p>\n<p>A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft&#8217;s spreadsheet software.<\/p>\n<p>Now, a small biz with few customer accounts might consider Excel to be fit for purpose. But surely housing an Olympic stadium-sized database on a standalone spreadsheet is bonkers, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s a mighty big nail for such a small hammer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know how some people, having mastered a particular software tool, keep trying to fit every task into the one tool they know even when it&#8217;s awkward to do? I&#8217;ve seen people using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word or another word processor to produce letters &mdash; and people using Word to do spreadsheet-like tasks. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,15],"tags":[350,94,314,92],"class_list":["post-9638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-technology","tag-london","tag-microsoft","tag-olympics","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2vs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9639,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions\/9639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}