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Excel is underrated. Once I had to find the distribution that best fit an average DB of measuremenents , about 10 thousand samples, no Matlab allowed (my former company was seriously allergic to paying for equipment, licenses and personnel).
Ok, let's get R: its own examples did not work, with syntax errors. It could not open an elephanting text file either.
Let's try a bunch of other software, in trial mode: either they were limited to 100 samples or could not open an elephanting text file. That function was missing anyway.
3 days wasted, then I resorted to Excel: 2 hours later I had a bunch of common distributions with various parameters plotted and the error curves. Found mine, was a Gaussian, job done.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Excel is magnificent software, certainly the best spreadsheet around, and a good contender for "best software ever" - though it would lose to Visual Studio!
But ... it's not a DB, and shouldn't be used as such - as soon as you start treating each sheet as a separate table and trying to work foreign keys and relationships, and such like it starts to creak at the seams ... I'm happy with a couple of hundred rows being a "DB lite", or used as a DB for a mailing list, but I've seen people with thousands of rows or hundreds of columns linked to a dozen sheets. One guy I used to work for actually had is build lists, stock control, and personnel allocation as one huge sheet that took 1/2 hour to open. It was clever, yes. It was stupid as well!
People sometimes forget that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should. 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My wife's company use similar spreadsheets. It is a very small company, 4 people + boss, with a high turnover of personnel (my wife is the second oldest employee and she's there since less than 3 years while the company dates back at least 10 years).
Pros:
* Everyone can be trained to use and maintain them quite quickly, no need for a real system expert on premise - the resident tech manages the small infrastructure from server to worksataion and performs the regular job as well.
* Flexible: they have to follow a lot of regulamentations and laws, which in Italy may change 4 times a year. Planning a complex, solid system is nigh impossible, it would be either excessivly complex and expensive or too rigid.
Cons:
* Sometimes Excel elephants it up.
* Sometimes the users elephant it up.
* Can be slow, especially on their hardware.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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ofcourse Excel cant mimic a professional SQL server, but you must also see the costs.
But connecting a complex database to Excel for some operations would go easy.
But can a SQL server compute any near like Excel?
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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Of course not: they are different tools for different jobs: SQL is excellent as storing information, at handling relationships between data, and retrieving it for queries. Excel is a data processing engine, and it provides a rich set of functions for that.
But while you can get SQL to do some data processing, it's not good at it; equally, excel can store data but it's poor at that - and once it's functions start getting used for something complex they rapidly become worse to read and modify than VB or even Regexes!
And don't get me started on people who assume that an Excel file would be great for multiuser access ... 
To get the best of both worlds you use a DB and a processing language (even VB, if you must) and reap the benefits of stable data storage and maintainable processing power.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I totally conform to that. SQL has the unmatched power to store and integrate data, but Excel is gigantic at perfoming some end user processing and polishing.
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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And don't forget Access! 
BTW: If Excel can be used as a database, so can Notepad...
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
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CSV files ...
JSON data ...
XML ...
I've seen people in QA trying to treat them as databases, yes ... "Insert" and "Delete" normally throw them, and "Update" generally shoves a very large spanner in the works!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Johnny J. wrote: so can Notepad
Damn straight! it's a base(home) for data. makes perfect sense. 
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[X] dBase
[X] Btrieve
[X] Paradox
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I maintain 20+ years old apps, they are using .DBF files, originally in CA-Clipper language.
It is a xBase family language, the most known is probably VFP (Visual Fox Pro).
It is very light weight database without server.
Years ago, I switched to Harbour/xHarbour and looking to switch again to xSharp when I have time.
Patrice
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
modified 20-Apr-20 6:38am.
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Good luck with that.
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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No problem, I am used to.
Patrice
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
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Missing Option: No Database.
I am not using any database, but the results we generate (in local folder) are imported to a SQL database by a tool done by other department.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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