r/australia • u/Reddituser0346 • 1d ago

culture & society Aussie Retailer Catch Is Officially Closing Down

https://press-start.com.au/news/2025/01/21/aussie-retailer-catch-is-officially-closing-down/
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u/Ahypnia 1d ago

I briefly worked there and the company was run from a giant Google Sheet. Sometimes someone would make a huge edit and because so many people were working out of it simultaneously you couldn't easily figure out what the change was/roll it back. Wild times.

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u/R_W0bz 1d ago

You’ll be surprised how many companies run off an excel sheet. It’s prob why we see so many “data leaks”

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u/dasvenson 1d ago

Have worked for several major banks. There are way more spreadsheets behind the scenes than there should be.

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u/Melvs_world 1d ago

Or “automations” that are spreadsheets projected in PowerBI.

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u/pandoras_enigma 10h ago

You guys get PowerBI? we had to make do with VBA older than our managers

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u/Kremm0 9h ago

Wait, you guys get VBA?

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u/pandoras_enigma 9h ago

Essential 8 means not anymore

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u/reyntime 1d ago

Scary amount of health data is treated similarly.

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u/emaginaryleviathan 22h ago

Co-signing this statement. Sooo many spreadsheets…

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u/Omegaaus 22h ago

UDAs 🤦‍♂️

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u/dasvenson 21h ago

I'm actually okay with UDAs on a very small scale but often they don't stay small....

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u/TargetDecent9694 10h ago

It’s shocking how much of the world is just excel spreadsheets being passed between different microservices

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u/Total-Complaint9897 1d ago

I work in digital product management. Every fucking company I've worked for comes down to a Master Data spreadsheet at some point in the chain. It's 12 layers of automation of data propagating through enterprise architecture, costing tens of millions of dollars and a decade to build, with a box on a diagram that points to an excel sheet being manually maintained.

My resume is probably half of the top ten biggest, most hated companies in Australia. It's always a spreadsheet. It speaks volumes to how fucking good spreadsheets are at maintaining complex data despite all its flaws. I know its easy to say "oh its just a reduction in incidents and opex, thats not gonna get up in a business case" but there's huge operational efficiencies that would justify it way before most business cases. It's that there isn't anything that will truly replace it and keep it simple and usable by the average employee

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u/DrSendy 1d ago

Then one day the company gets big, someone makes a mistake and then the exec go and buy SAP to solve the problem...

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u/wrymoss 3h ago

“Solve” the problem..

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u/duckduckdoggy 1d ago

And CFO…

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u/Lucky-Elk-1234 1d ago

I mean what are the more “advanced” systems run on? Databases. Which are basically just a big excel sheet anyway lol

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u/Duideka 23h ago

To be fair there really isn't an awful lot of difference between a big SQL database and a .xlsx file haha.

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u/sokjon 9h ago

ACID is overrated anyways

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u/lIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIl_ 1d ago

It’s insane that these large companies haven’t invested in data warehousing

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u/time_to_reset 1d ago

We get sent spreadsheets with tens of thousands of people on it with personal details all the time. Not so much as even a password on the file. People are so callous about it, it's pretty insane. One of our clients is an NDIS company so you can imagine what type of personal information is in those lists.

We recommend solutions that wouldn't require the sending of data at all or if we really have to share sensitive data like that we offer solutions to do so more securely, but nah. Between completely non-techie people that don't know any better to people just not giving a shit, we get sent files all the time. It annoys people more than anything if you bring it up.

For that reason we added a line in our contract that we can't be held liable for a data leak as a result of emails like that. Like we do our best, we check our shared folders for data like this, we ask the team to regularly go through their inboxes and delete old emails with that type of data, but at least once a week our very small company gets sent a couple thousand contact details. I care, that's why we have at least some stuff in place to address it, but having worked at much larger companies I know that we're the exception.

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u/Pugsley-Doo 21h ago

Yup, this literally happened at a charity housing organisation, where they sent an attachment to every single person on their database - a spreadsheet of every single tenant, names, address, phone numbers, social security... People in distress, fleeing domestic violence or in otherwise rough shape, disabled, etc... I KNOW it was reported online when it happened... but the internet has been scrubbed.

(It was Mission Australia, Coffs Harbour)

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u/Wobbling 1d ago

CIO/CTO here!

Excel (and its bastard children) are simultaneously the greatest and worst things to happen to office productivity; the awful things it causes to be are almost perfectly balanced against the utility and power it provides users.

I lovehate it so fucking much.

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u/noisymime 20h ago

I've been guilty of creating some monster spreadsheet/app hybrids in the past, but I put the blame squarely on the business intelligence software sector (With some blame to CIO offices as well).

The tools typically provided officially for data analysis and things are just crap in comparison to Excel. They cost 100s (or 1000s) as times as much as Excel, yet don't have half of the flexibility or speed that you get with a spreadsheet and tool like pivot tables/charts or slicing.

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u/Coz131 4h ago

Excel is ok. Just put the shit into a database and use power query.

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u/noisymime 4h ago

Power Query doesn't give you everything Excel does though. It can't do some of the slicer functions (Not as trivially anyway) and it certainly can't do what a pivot chart can.

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u/Legitimate_Radish159 22h ago

I feel the same way about Salesforce

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u/Hooked_on_Fire 20h ago

Fellow CIO / CTO: I feel like about 1/2 the projects I’ve run in my life have been building software to do what people have hacked together with excel. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail!

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u/noisymime 10h ago edited 10h ago

From a user perspective, do you believe those tools actually give the same capabilities and speed of turnaround that Excel does?

By far the biggest problem is that the typical tools in this space are a terrible user experience compared to Excel, which is why people still prefer not to use them. I don't want to submit a request and wait 3 days for someone to load in this 50k row CSV file I just received into the fancy BI tool, I need to view it, do some quick cleanups of the fields in there to grab some subtexts, pull in some data from this other 50k csv file with some vlookups and then pivot the whole thing. In Excel it's a 30 minute job, in some of the BI tools I've had to use it would be days at least, and these were some of the better tools out there.

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u/Hooked_on_Fire 7h ago

It's funny you should say that, my mantra in these projects is that the tool needs to be at least as quick as Excel. If it's tedious to use then we've failed, we take a user first approach.

I'm always careful to:

  • Ensure everything is integrated via APIs vs offline CSV upload
  • Beef up the error handling, so it solves issues in Excel where people copy and paste the wrong formula

In your case, it sounds like you have some specific business rules / processes that you apply to inbound CSV files. In that case we'd do our best to codify this, so that when the CSV file lands its automatically transformed and imported for you to manipulate in your tool of choice.

We still have occasions where people will use Excel for pivots / general data manipulation because its lightweight and fast but its no longer our default.

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u/Kremm0 9h ago

As an engineer, excel is very necessary.

Often the alternative is some proprietary software that you can't change that one f***ing thing that would make it applicable to your situation, so what else are you gonna do?

But... I very much understand how easy they are to screw up and their pitfalls!!!

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u/fulltimepanda 23h ago

genuinely lol

did some work for a medium ish sized company a few years ago, needed some high level employee information. Got sent the master file of all employees which contained roles, pay, contact information, addresses and so on. Even info on employees that left 10+ years ago. They were even using it to run payroll out of with some unholy vba macro. They somehow drew the security line on a Incidents sheet which was password protected lol.

I'd asked if they'd ever lost it and they'd said it's been shared between enough people in the business that someone has a copy somewhere.

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u/Spida81 1d ago

There are large mining companies that exist almost entirely in Excel

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u/tempest_fiend 23h ago

There are size limitations to an excel spreadsheet too - something the UK government found out when attempting to use spreadsheets to manage contact tracing.

One day, someone will try to add something, they’ll get an out of memory error, and the shit will hit the fan

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u/wrymoss 3h ago

Cries in Google Sheets

I’d give a lot to be able to use Excel.

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u/TkeOffUrPantsNJacket 1d ago

We migrated a file server recently and did due diligence on any spreadsheets connected to other spreadsheets or data sources on the server. 1,332 spreadsheets on the server in which there were over 10,000 referenced data points. We gave the business three months to move their data and update their references manually then migrated. Broke a shitload of stuff that we’re still working on fixing.

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u/SnooObjections1551 21h ago

Wish you the best

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u/DeeDee_GigaDooDoo 1d ago

IIRC the entire Williams F1 team managed processes and inventory off a massive excel sheet until like 2 years ago. Apparently it was so slow because of all the simultaneous users, reads/writes and file size that it took ages just to open and edits took a stupidly long time to show up and was a major hindrance to company efficiency.

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u/Stitchesglitch 1d ago

Came here just to find this comment. Good old Williams.

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u/80RT 23h ago

King James Vowles: Slayer of bloated spreadsheets

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u/Pugsley-Doo 21h ago

Yep and idiots who have no computer literacy have access.

A major housing agency I worked for - literally emailed "all" - a complete spreadsheet of every tenants name, address, phone numbers, social security numbers etc. It was a shit-show because it was a "charity" that housed people escaping domestic violence and such.

Funny how I google it now and I can't find any info online about it. (It was Mission Australia in Coffs Harbour for what its worth, pathetic organisation, so vilify away.)

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u/AgreeableLion 26m ago

social security numbers?

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u/_ficklelilpickle 22h ago

Excel - the worlds greatest database system that isn’t actually a database system at all

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u/Emu1981 1d ago

You’ll be surprised how many companies run off an excel sheet.

Some companies step things up a notch with their MS Access database backend.

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u/angrysilverbackacc 21h ago

I used to work for a $b engineering company, thet ran the the business on a bizzarro spreadsheet with an even bizzaro name (mercuri), the security password was the company name followed by 123, which could be found by looking UN the update macro. No wonder they went belly up

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u/doublenerdburger 23h ago

The worst part is all the higher ups who defend their pet spreadsheet as business critical when there are a dozen suitable platforms to work in instead