The problem is that we (the tech industry) seem to only offer two choices, do it a) the wrong Excel way b) do it the huge giant IT initiative way...
And even when b) is chosen, when users log into the multi-million dollar CRM system, the first thing they reach for is still the "export to Excel" button.
I see it as a failure of education. I have no CS background and when I was starting out at my first job, I would love to have known then what I know now about databases and database-driven application programming. I would love to have had a proper class or two about it in school. But I didn't, so all I knew was the bad, wrong, "e-mail the spreadsheet" way. At my old company we had people whose entire job was basically to take a huge Excel file, turn it into a pivot table (basically a simple cross-tab query) and e-mail the result to people periodically.
I love Access forever because it sucked me into programming. I heard that it was a database but I didn't know what that meant and didn't have anyone who could teach me, so I learned it just by poking at it when I was bored at work until it started to make sense. Then I used it to mash two customer data sources together and tie a sales lead tracker to it--basically a quick and dirty replacement for our slow, over-engineered Oracle CRM system that no one actually used. I know now that what I made was also wrong in many ways and would make a real developer recoil in horror, but it was great fun to make and people actually used it. And it got me interested in databases, which got me into making LAMP apps, which got me into Rails, and so on...
And even when b) is chosen, when users log into the multi-million dollar CRM system, the first thing they reach for is still the "export to Excel" button.
I see it as a failure of education. I have no CS background and when I was starting out at my first job, I would love to have known then what I know now about databases and database-driven application programming. I would love to have had a proper class or two about it in school. But I didn't, so all I knew was the bad, wrong, "e-mail the spreadsheet" way. At my old company we had people whose entire job was basically to take a huge Excel file, turn it into a pivot table (basically a simple cross-tab query) and e-mail the result to people periodically.
I love Access forever because it sucked me into programming. I heard that it was a database but I didn't know what that meant and didn't have anyone who could teach me, so I learned it just by poking at it when I was bored at work until it started to make sense. Then I used it to mash two customer data sources together and tie a sales lead tracker to it--basically a quick and dirty replacement for our slow, over-engineered Oracle CRM system that no one actually used. I know now that what I made was also wrong in many ways and would make a real developer recoil in horror, but it was great fun to make and people actually used it. And it got me interested in databases, which got me into making LAMP apps, which got me into Rails, and so on...