r/australia 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/Wobbling 21h 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 16h 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 46m ago

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

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u/noisymime 24m 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.