There’s a really fine line between needing a spreadsheet and needing a database and I’ve not yet found it. It’s probably more fuzzy than I realized but I have participated on so many programming projects that amounted to a spreadsheet that lived too long.
Does it need to be accessed by multiple people? Does it need to be updated frequently? Does it need to be accessed programmatically? Does performance matter? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should probably use a database.
If it’s something you interact with manually, has less than 100,000 rows, and is mostly static, then sure, use a spreadsheet.
I used to have some scripts to convert and merge between CSV and sqlite3. Even a lightweight db like sqlite3 has value. Google Sheets fills some of the gaps with its QUERY statement but I still find it a bit awkward to use a lot of the time.
Not going to lie. I have made it really far using Google sheets as a database until I had to move to a full DB. Google Sheets is just an interface to a Google run DB anyways. A lot of the time I would just load sheets(tables) into data structures from a SQL library and use it like a regular database.
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I can believe that. Where I work people use the Bi system to dump data out to Excel to then build the reports they want to see. Madness.
