Excel As A Database

[This posting gained some fame in the programming world a few years ago and was included in the book, The Best Software Writing, by Joel Spolsky.]

by Rory Blyth

As a developer, you`ve probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of "data" by someone in marketing and told to "do something with it."

Columns probably didn`t line up, and a thousand different fonts were used. Every feature of Excel was probably abused and abused again in order to avoid having to use an actual database application for storage of the data.

Of course, it`s up to you to make sense of the layout, and they could just give a bleepity-bleep about what a pain in the ass it is to suck weird data out of Excel and "do something with it" when little or (more often) no thought has been given to possibly making the data consistent or, dare I say, orderly.

To this end, I`ve put together another art project. This time, what you will see unfold before your peepers is a process of discovery - My thoughts on how these files are created.

[Note: I wound up drawing one of the characters with fangs and, eventually, "crazy eyes" - I don`t know why I did this. It just felt right. ]