Re: Vlookup nightmare

aaron.kempf@xxxxxxxxx wrote...
....
>i mean-- get real-- real companies are required to purchase office
>professional licenses right?

Nope. While I have Access on my machine (and a lot of other nonstandard
software which I've convinced the powers that be to let me have), no
one else in the department in which I work has it. So under 5% of Pcs
here with Access.

>i know that back in the day; companies would try to use small business
>edition-- i dont really know or care how standard editon is effecting
>this

Too bad, because many companies are using standard.

>but i think that you're crazy; and that 70% of business desktops have
>Access installed.

Why don't you check? As I mentioned above, it's under 5% in the
department in which I work (me only out of 22 people). Granted that's
annecdotal. But if you believe most Office installs include Access,
you're the one smoking something.

And just stop for a moment and consider what it means for your, er,
point if fewer than 1/3 of business PCs that have Excel also have
Access.

>databases _ARE_ ideal for rapid calculations

While you're still writing the queries (note the plural) needed for
most order-dependent calculations, I'd already have gotten the anser.
You're confusing having the machine calculate the answer AFTER you've
finished telling it what to do with the time it takes to tell it how to
determine the answer. Writing a few formulas is much quicker than
writing the nontrivial queries needed to produce the same result.
Consult the amortization table queries I had to do since you had no
clue how to do them. If you think you could do that in only one or two
queries, prove it!

>it's all about putting your data into Analysis Services and making it
>more useable and flexible through 'real' pivot Tables instead of the
>cheesy pivotTables that excel gives you

Pivot tables are no use whatsoever for amortization tables, moving
averages or other time series analysis, discounted cashflow analysis,
etc., all of which involve (guess I need to repeat this AGAIN)
order-dependent calculations and recursive calculations.

Pivot tables spew out aggregates, just like simple queries. You don't
realize those are lightweight calculations.

>thanks for the info about improv.. i am going to have to research that
>i just dont think that copying forumulas into 10,000 different cells is
>the most efficient way to do things.

Good luck, because Improv died off before Mosaic came into being, so
there may not be much about it on the web.

>if nothing else; it wastes space.

Depends. It may use more disk space than would be used in SQL queries,
but less space in memory if the only database equivalent requires
nontrivial joins.

>i just believe that this war will get a lot more interesting in the
>next few years.

Unlikely. As long as training budgets are minimal, databases are going
no where. I don't consider that a good thing, but I think you're
seriously deluded if you believe end-user database usage is going to
catch up with end-user spread*** usage.

There may be software that eclipses spreadsheets, but it won't be
databases.

.