Excel its not a database... but its great for finances and more

Great for handling positive covid-19 test results,

Oh hang on......

Excel is great to convert an existing xlsx to csv so you can process the data in a more useful tool

I already saw a "software" in Excel which were used to minitor serveurs. It made http requests and sent enmail notification lol.

I know because I worked on iot :(

@NEMESISprj Excel actually really sucks at CSV. Use OpenOffice/Libreoffice calc for that. You can consistently use comma separation or any other delimiter you choose (With default locale settings here Excel semicolon delimits everything). And you can make documents UTF-8 or an encoding you actually choose instead of some fucked up Latin-1 veriaty.

@hjk101 hmmmm you know, those are actually really strong arguments for using those programs. Never really took the time to bother with it (editing your locale seperator once on windows is enough for that specific issue), but is good to know if I want something reliable.
Sidenote: how the F do developers of excel think it's a good feature to rename every damn function per language? The few times I use excel I have to keep a function translation site open to translate every function I want (plus in my native language most function names are really unintuitive)

@NEMESISprj if you open a csv in calc it shows you a preview and you can select the delimiter and encoding.

If you get a lot of csv files from different sources like I do in some days you have to switch it 5 times just to open the bloody csv files correctly. For customers I made an auto detect so they can just upload any format and I get actual CSV out if it but a lot of stuff still gets hand exported by different continents of Excel users (mostly from Netherlands and coworkers though)

@hjk101 fair enough. But luckily most tools that I use for data processing (R and Python), I can simply let the script choose what to do depending on the extension and Metadata. And I never have to deal with a lot of different sources so that helps..

Actually, Excel _is_ a database. It just is worse than LibreOffice Calc.
And neither of it is a RDBMS, multiuser capable, supporting ACID, have a good query language, supports millions of records, has nice index support, supports foreign keys,...

Not everything, wich technically also is a database, also is the right tool for the job.

Could also say that excel is a no-sql database with only COM query support. Oh network capability is only available through local OneDrive synced file storage.

For finances I'd rather use something like Homebank tho...

Or MySQL :^)

Excel is quite a powerful tool that is used both in business and during studies. With Excel you can organize and analyze data in a structured way. If necessary, you can always convert PDF to Excel in other formats https://pdfflex.com/word-to-pdf I often use this platform. The great advantage is that you can do it online and for free.