BOFH: You can take our lives, but you'll never take OUR MACROS "...And I can't seem to import all of the data I need," the user explains. "And you're importing into Excel from what... a CSV file?" the PFY asks. "Yes." "And the import fails?" "I just stops. It says something about resources." "So perhaps you should get rid of some of the data in the spreadsheet?" "It's an almost …
He wrote a bunch of Excel macros that used a spread sheet to drive an NC milling machine.
He asked for help when the spreadsheet got sluggish and the resulting NC milling was all wonky.
I suggest he rewrote things using a programming language (C, Pascal, even BASIC). Nope. He was "frightened of programming"/
Eventually he came around when I explained to him that he'd been programming for years in Excel macros and using a real programming language to do this task would end up being easier.
... is for non-techies.
At a younger age I built a micro-CMS to catalogue all my porn clips - depending on my mood that night (or that morning, or mid-afternoon, as long as my Mum was out shopping) I could sort them by my star rating, how many times watched (ah, I'm fed up with TP, I'm going to watch JJ for a bit instead), or category (er, Position? "Finish?")
No Joke-Icon. Honestly. But curiously enough, One Night In Paris only scored 1/5 for me.
"Bloody beancounters," the PFY says. "You'd write email in excel if you could figure out how to do it in a font you like.
Like when Kelly Rowland texts her boyfriend in Excel on a Nokia Communicator:
http://mynokiablog.com/2013/06/08/weekend-lol-kelly-rowland-texting-boyfriend-with-nokia-communicator-via-excel/
Before I fled, I worked as a 'DBA' for a Big Aerospace company and was forced to use Access for everything - the spods in IT were outsourced morons who wouldn't allow anyone to actually do anything with IT beyond what was on the desktop. So we had Access and we made it jump through all sorts of hoops. When my boss and I quit there were hundreds of them! All with hundreds of users, and because it was so rubbish at multi user, it was split up and so only a dozen users were in any instance, which another Access db later pulled in and merged, and so on.
The 'backups' were insane. They were done by another series of Access databases, so when some muppet deleted all their weeks reporting "by accident' we could still get it.
There was a Access db front end menu that looked up which version of which database that user was to be presented with when they clicked 'the' button - which was actually changed depending on where, when and who did the clicking...
This was all backed up on a 'secret' HDD that was swapped in and it of the bosses laptop, as he couldn't get permission to store so much data anywhere. (It was also on the network, but since it was a database, IT couldn't cope with backing it up! They'd back up the initial file, but anything that changed they didn't notice. And this was a major IT company! )
So anyway, when my boss quit, I wasn't long behind him. And I became a locksmith. (Still a very technical job, but far fewer computers!)
I still sometimes wonder how the muppets got on. They were the kind of users baffled by the scroll bar moving the page down...
I remember working as a COBOL programmer at a pension company in 1997. The beancounters were forever asking if we could give them a daily download of ALL the data in the mainframe database so they could import it into Excel rather than using the Mainframe software.
Never mind that the resulting CSV file would have been bigger than the hard disks of their PCs and would have taken several days to download over the 9600 baud serial cable. LOL.
Never mind that the resulting CSV file would have been bigger than the hard disks of their PCs and would have taken several days to download over the 9600 baud serial cable. LOL.
Okay, rare anonymous post from me, only because this is a current client that we're working a solution for. I don't want to embarrass anyone.
We have a client that wanted to do something similar: a year's worth of energy meter data (~12 data points at 32-bits each sampled at 10 minute intervals) downloaded in 10 minutes over a 19200 baud serial link (the maximum the energy meter would support: the meter was chosen on cost). Of course we didn't find out about the 10-minute download time requirement until after they complained it was too slow.
It never occurred to anyone there that 32-bits == 4 bytes, that 12 samples at 4 bytes each is 48 bytes, plus a time-stamp, call that 52 bytes, per sample. 144 samples per day is 7488 bytes generated daily, or about 2.7MB per year which would take over 18 minutes assuming no protocol overheads.
To be fair, "19200 baud" was probably meaningless. It sounds like a lot to the untechnical user. Over RS-485 which sends one bit per symbol, that's 19.2kbps. When you're used to ADSL connections at 1.5Mbps minimum, you forget how slow 19.2kbps is. More than fast enough for reporting energy readings, and collecting data out of a meter on a frequent basis, but rather slow if you're going to download in bulk annually.
What we're doing instead: plug an industrial computer into the meter permanently, reading data out of the meter at regular intervals to store on an internal memory card. Then use udev hotplug scripts to detect the insertion of a USB memory stick to trigger a mount-dump-unmount script. We should be able to do this in under a minute.
People will have expectations that, to them may sound reasonable. It's up to us technical people to figure out how to manage or meet that expectation. Our measure as a technical person is in how well we can achieve this.
That's awful. I was the treasurer for a hall for some years and generated emails or letters and envelopes from the spreadsheet automatically. And I've a speadsheet with CDs in it for a club and collect statistics about popularity. And I've got macros for importing from an SQL database dump automatically including reading the database description and doing some database operations. I think I should keep a low profile or some BOFH is going to open the lift doors for me when when there's no lift behind.
Windows Media Player does all that crap. Badly. Excel 32-bit badly.
I, ahem, "imported" a song list from a drummer friend of mine. Over 3 weeks of music playtime, more than your average FM radio broadcaster. Over 17.000 songs. 15 lbs of CDs and a whole afternoon of "backup".
I just wanted WMP to make a list of all the songs I never heard, or, "heard <1 time". It craps out at 10.000, but it is capable to recognize I never heard that music, or "played 0 times". Since it is an automatic list, I just rebuild it every time I play. I leave it blaring away on that playlist of over 40 GB of high bitrate MP3.
It still couldn't reach 10.000 'unheard' songs, 2 years later. The albums include front cover, my personal rating, how many times I heard, bitrate... but WMP can't see over 10k songs. I'm guessing that when it filters under criteria, the best it can do is to return 10.000 matches, but it can work with a larger 'database'. At least it never crashed.
How about a bit of truth based on someone who had to develop in Access from V1.1 to 2010 (and Oracle, Rdb, Informix, PostgreSQL, Sybase,SQL Server, etc).
Within its limitations, And IF done by someone who had slogged up the very long and very steep learning curve Acess generally reasonable - IF:
The forms,, code and reports are in a separate front-end from the back-end database.
No more than 5-10 concurrent connections to a shared writable Access back-end.
No more than 50-100,000 rows in a table which should not be linked to more than a couple of smallish tables.
No wireless networking.
If you really, really, need to go beyond this, Access is fine if you use the separate front-end to a SQL Server backend, when experience has shown that 10 million rows, up to 50 or so concurrent users, many more relationships, and wireless clients are OK, provided that you rewrite any queries to be on the back-end and use stored procedures.
Now can the web kiddies who use MySQL because it is scalable and reliable please keep the noise down while I go for my senior citizen's nap?
"Within its limitations, And IF done by someone who had slogged up the very long and very steep learning curve Acess generally reasonable - IF: [...]"
I totally agree: Access is almost as good as any other entry-level database system, only a lot more convoluted to use, less reliable, with more limitations, and (for most) more expensive. It doesn't make it completely unusable if you really, really have to (as I did at some point). It does make it the least efficient tool of its class* and a right PITA though.
*that I have encountered, obviously. There may be worse. I've been told horror tales about the database tools in early releases of OpenOffice, for example, but I have no first-hand experience about it.
... when I recall one Access DB that an end user proudly showed me. A quick look at "relationships" showed 40 odd tables in a grid formation each linked to the eight surrounding it, with random links running elsewhere. I muttered something about changing the links to enable cascading updates and forgot to mention deletes also cascade.
I still have no idea what it was supposed to do and I'm sure they managed to recover from backups.
The blame lies with who makes the requirements and projected requirements for a system. Access has some use like for a single user that has no always on machine. Problem is people latch on to the fast solution because no thought is given to where something will end up in a year or mores time or what it truly needs to be able to accomplish. I fixed payrolls excel sheets twice last week, and by fixed i mean restored from previous and told them to start over, best way to fix a messed up cell.
No, it doesn't. There's almost always something more suitable around.
I successfully manage to avoid Access and Foxpro. I had to use databases in the days of dBase, and I didn't get on with it. However, Borland's Paradox and I were pretty much go from the moment I started messing around with it, and I've cooked up all sorts of weird stuff over the years (mostly grabbing data from other systems which wasn't meant to be exported, using bits of Turbo Pascal to clean it up).
I was mainly hacking my way around problems or make things more efficient in a way that was repeatable and stable. It was fun, but then I got into networking and sort of never looked back.
Our head bean counter has been here for about 12 years and I don't know that he has yet created a NEW spreadsheet. It seems that all of his spreadsheets are just new copies of spreadsheets that the prior head bean counters had created. Which makes sense in a way - why should a man who is both a skilled brain surgeon and an obviously God-gifted rocket scientist need to know how to create a spreadsheet? But back to the point, this HBC loves to link spreadsheets. In fact, I think his spreadsheet for this year's financials probably links back to the original spreadsheet from 2002. All by way of the intervening 11 year's worth of spreadsheets, which are all themselves interlinked in a recursive fashion. So he frequently complains that "my PC is slow". Yeah, it's not hard having Excel read 23 different spreadsheets at once or anything. All while the guy has at least 20 different windows opened for things like Internet-radio, email, several Word documents, numerous instances of Explorer and Firefox. And other, unrelated spreadsheets.
Head Bean Counters - definitely make me wish we'd scrap all the desktop PCs and go back to VT100 terminals...
For me, Access is not bad software. Neither is Excel. They're just mis-applied by people who don't understand them.
The problem is that it's powerful, flexible, easy to use software that a lot of people get access to. Then the small project get a few extra requirements. Then people don't use it just for indication, but start to really rely on the data. Then the bloke what wrote it moves on (or just forgets everything)... It's not BAD software, it's just being horrendously mis-used. But it's like saying a family hatchback is crap for courier work (it is, but it can do it) or a HGV is crap as a family car (it can do it, but it's a bitch to park in Tescos, and uses vastly more fuel than necessary)... Horses for Courses. I control this by giving only the runtime version of Access - unless people can convince me they genuinely need it and are going to apply it appropriately.
Excel - great as a spreadsheet. Would people *PLEASE* stop using it as a micro-database, though? It's simply not designed to do that, and it's testimony to the flexibility of the design that it can. Kinda. But it's really there for recording, calculating and displaying relatively small amounts of data in a particular format.... It's not there to be a faux front-end on a database...
My wife has a brother-in-law who is a Beancounter...and her sister was one for a long while also (before she thought she should go and find God...and that has been a real laugh)...and this Anal Retentive idiot accounts for every penny he and his wife spend on a daily basis.
When they used to come and visit us (fortunately, haven't had them visit in years), he would pour out his wife's wallet...empty his pockets and wallet onto our Den coffee table...arrange every coin and paper bill in neat stacks by denomination...and then make a hand written accounting of their day's expenditures.
It creeped my wife out so much, that she told the both of them to stop doing this in our house.
But they still do it in their own home. Pathetic pair they are.
Look, BOFH is NOT satire. It happens every day, and we all want the proper cattle prod that we can use on the current "boss", but he hasn't approved the budget yet.
One of these days.
As for spreadsheets: My dad could "audit" spreadsheets that were produced manually in the 60's (sometimes they took a full day to do all the calculations). He could take a quick look and point to cell "H10" and say "This is wrong". It scared lots of people.
The Boss uses Excel for everything and the trainee adds macros to them all. We are an outsources IT company, I have just rebuilt all our client records in to a wiki and my boss was amazed how much easier it was to find things that one endless table per client. He still uses them for project management and keeping records of quotes etc, but I will solve this addiction soon...
I would venture that the bean-counter knows about as much about computer programming as the BOFH and PFY know about bookkeeping.
A spreadsheet is pretty close to a physical accounts book in appearance, It's not a dreadful general-purpose tool. But it's limited in scale. I wouldn't use Excel, but a spreadsheet for storing data such as the details of a video collection should work.
Take a tool that you know and a problem that you don't. For sufficiently small/simple instances of the problem, it is easier to (ab)use the tool that you know rather than learn a new tool. Having done that, it is even easier to continue the abuse even as the problem grows in scale or complexity.
That's why we end up with Excel as a database. That's why people use languages like Javascript, Java, Python and the rest for serious development. (They were all developed as "toy" languages trading rigour for ease of use in very limited contexts.) That's why people adopted C++ when object-oriented programming became popular. That's why people use toy operating systems like the original Unix (and the original Minix, and I suppose CP/M and DOS) as the basis for OSes that are now running datacenters and server farms. That's why people virtualise an entire OS rather than use an OS that is capable of properly separating multiple tasks.
Almost everything we love and hate in IT happens because quick and dirty is easier, or cheaper, and in that sense *better*, than "doing it properly".
There's a nail with a sore head (to continue the analogy)...
My organisation has taken a small Excel spreadsheet used to track sales costs and blown it up to be the central basis for all costs, price and margin calculations for each line item (potentially thousands) across each deal. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of a horrendous POS which constantly craps out, taking Excel as a whole with it.
Plenty of off-the-shelf tools out there which would do the job quicker, better and without crashing every two minutes but will we buy them? NoooOOOooo...
Bastards.
I still remember the "rename Hatten.ttf" trick to get 97 and 2000 running on the same computer.
I did read two thick books on Access at the time (the second one was mostly office automation), but moved on to SQL Server. Pity I never kept up with .NET or I would be a lot richer today.
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