Excel as a database
I know it's fun to beat up on people who use their software meant for summing accounting tables as simple databases, but really the alternatives in these small cases usually introduce so much friction to the user and require so much work to get up and running as to not be worth it.<p>Even worse, most of the "right" solutions eliminate the easy look at dozens of rows that a spreadsheet offers (letting the user do fast unconscious visual comparisons in their own data) vs. showing what's essentially one row out of some table at a time.<p>Sometimes a simple grid that users can quickly navigate around, enter stuff into and see all of <i>is</i> the best solution.<p>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...<p>I bet there's huge money to be made in a simple spreadsheet-like user interface that can be setup with similar constraints as a database (field types, foreign key constraints etc). That's all it seems both sides really want.