I don't consider people serious who still believe that excel is a database!

Company I work for (non IT) has a history with using Excel for almost everything, from "Databases" to downright Wikis which in part is responsible for my taking up peogramming.

Why. 0 normal form.
:)

@IntrusionCM I think, columns can be created so as to meet 1st normal form pretty quickly :)

@stackphish not (entirely) true.

or better: devil is in the details.

The first normal form says that non atomar attributes must be resolved.

You could add columns, yes.

But a worksheet of excel must not contain explicitly one table.

As far as I know you could only reference a cell range in excel and a worksheet.

Hence - to have a definement of a relation which is necessary to fulfill the requirements that _all_ attributes (as in every attribute in all relations) you have this lil trouble of ending up with a half fulfilled requirement.

If you could define that one worksheet, which can be uniquely adressed, must only contain one table.... Then you would have a strict fulfillment of the first NF.

Afaik a worksheet name is unique, even by name.

I had this conversation with a data scientist on LinkedIn, the guy kept telling me excel is a db because you can query it an import it to R or python.

I kept saying you can di the same thing with a csv, a text file or XML and that doesn't make them databases.

The guy didn't budge, even after accepting XML isn't and me dropping the bomb: Excel is a glorified XML bitch.

@IntrusionCM i hate to tell you this, but you can query fields from.ither workbooks too.

If you try hard enough, you xan have a relational diagram mapped and working on excel files.
As long as it is for reading only and the data is clean, you can make it work.

I never used excel as a database. But what is the technical argument here?

No indexing No database?

@mundo03 Yes. I'm aware of it.

It's too warm here... But that was my point.

When looking at normalization and databases, you need to see the normalization as a full concept.

In order to have a "relation" in excel, you need to have a worksheet and this worksheet must contain exactly one table.

Then you could create a database.

Whole file - one database
Worksheet - one table
Table

If you'd stick multiple tables into one single worksheet, you will not have a unique relation.

If you stick only one table in one worksheet, it works

@IntrusionCM ok good we are in sync then :D