Uses for Excel
- Thread starter bigballin
- Start date
I disagree
I did notice until now, but the top portion of that double facepalm is Picard.
Things I use excel for:
1.) Constructing SQL statements - sometimes you have a data output file and you want to do an action to all of those rows but they are not homogenous - the only identifier you have is the record id. Put those in column C, add your SQL to column A and your ' and ' to columns B and D all the way down. Export to CSV using pipe signs - then open in Textpad and replace pipes with nothing.
Boom - 10,000 SQL statements written in < 1 minute
2.) Data matching. Foreign keys between three tables sometimes get out of sync. To re-sync them you can export all to Excel and do 3-page matching to get your keys back in sync.
3.) Data sorting - you can do this a million different ways
1.) Constructing SQL statements - sometimes you have a data output file and you want to do an action to all of those rows but they are not homogenous - the only identifier you have is the record id. Put those in column C, add your SQL to column A and your ' and ' to columns B and D all the way down. Export to CSV using pipe signs - then open in Textpad and replace pipes with nothing.
Boom - 10,000 SQL statements written in < 1 minute
2.) Data matching. Foreign keys between three tables sometimes get out of sync. To re-sync them you can export all to Excel and do 3-page matching to get your keys back in sync.
3.) Data sorting - you can do this a million different ways
^^^ This.
It was like Christmas when I discovered Excel 2007 handled 1.048 million rows (instead of 78,000 on Excel 2003). I had idiots laughing at me "why the hell would you ever need that many rows in Excel ...LOL?".
Ummm - data migration/manipulation/merging/management maybe?
I still use it all the time for making SQL statements and array( 'key'=>'val') type stuff.
Excel 2010 can run native 64-bit, and is only limited by available memory (instead of the 2gb 32-bit addressing limitation) - but they are still artificially limiting it to the 1048576 rows...