All B2B solutions boil down to "How I import your Excel"

Or export to excel,
Or macro in excel,
Or excel.... fuck me dead so much excel, seriously I do more excel then I do anything else 😢

I do enjoy csv to sql imports though, big data just got easy, and then export back to excel and make everyone think your the excel master 😁

@C0D4 One time, about 14 years ago, I was esked to make a server monitoring excel shit which sends emails ;p ;p ;p

I was young. I did it. But no... that shouldn't exists

Thank God for powerbi

@C0D4 That's exactly what I do

God, I wish this weren't true.

and most of the time, 50% of the solution is bitchslapping your customer until they use CSV instead. (or in fixing the awful data mangling excel does, especially when it thinks something is a date [insert patrick meme here: "is mayonnaise a date?"])

Storytime: In early 2021 I interviewed with 3 or 4 different companies, all extremely well paying and very successful, but yes, their apps all boiled down to "import or export your data into our tables or *GASP*, even import your CALENDAR data, and we'll add a layer of fun easy drag and drop logic!" yawn.

@tosensei CSV is not much better, fucking customers never encode them properly...
- UTF-8 encoded ISO-8859-1 chars, sometimes the opposite
- newlines (0x0a) within strings making most CSV parsers to read it as a new row
- missing column spearators
- too many column setarators
- mixed column separators

In the case of the newline problem, I had to write my own CSV parser with a custom state machine. I'm not a huge fan of Excel either, but at least shit like this doesn't happen there.

@PonySlaystation oh, but it IS so much better.

encoding isn't really a problem in my experience, and if the file provided is invalid, you just yell at whoever borked it up to fix their shit. which is so infinitely easy if you just use a standard library.

but with excel, screwing up the _data itself_ is a very likely probability even at the best of times...

@tosensei Yeah, that's a valid point, f the customers 😄

Also pdf
Fuck pdf

Excel: the database, programming environment and client app all in one single sharable file!