Re: Sorry but ...
All of these comments are true.
I worked for a self-proclaimed Excel guru (to be fair he knew an awful lot but not how to make it simple). Many of his spreadsheets produced great charts loved by management but by christ if you even reordered the cells to be in e.g. ascending order it would break whatever witchcraft he'd come up with.
And adding in a column? Forget about it.
Which meant the only person who could make changes was him. And then he'd get arsey when you asked because "too busy".
Then there are entire finance departments running the whole business on Excel. Made worse because their applications export to it/have plugins for it.
I've had full on arguments in the past where I've point-blank refused to give entire Citrix servers to finance teams so they can load their ludicrous Excel spreadsheets but even then despite it clearly not being the right tool for the job the only concession I can ever seem to get is to get them desktops/laptops so they only slow their own systems down.
And the thing is, it's easy to say "IT should..." but it is -very- difficult if you don't have someone at director level that can understand and explain the issues in terms that other directors can understand (risks, costs, benefits) in order to drive change.
It becomes even more challenging in cost-sensitive environments where things also "just work".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
