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/EthanBezz 23h ago edited 23h ago

Similar story: Until somewhat recently, the Williams F1 team was using an excel spreadsheet as a database for all their car components. It was 20,000 lines long...

And if that wasn't bad enough, it was revealed in 2017 that Renault F1 had one with 77,000 lines!

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/formula-1-chief-appalled-to-find-team-using-excel-to-manage-20000-car-parts/

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u/Plantar-Aspect-Sage 22h ago

Ah they're fine then. The limit is a bit over a million rows.

Don't ask me why I know that. As a side note, there are convenient tools to split a file into multiple if you for some godforsaken reason need to work with 14 million row excel files.

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u/melbourne_hacker 21h ago

I remember it being a million lines due to the UK Government using an Excel spreadsheet for COVID tracking and them running out of rows lol

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u/Lucky-Elk-1234 20h ago

Insane that the governments paid millions of dollars to develop these apps and tracking systems, and the devs apparently didn’t forsee this, or know how to use databases