Excel is your company's actual design tool - ThreadSky

spavel.bsky.social • 32 days ago

Excel is your company's actual design tool

Places where I’ve seen this happen almost always have a someone working a project out of an excel sheet and some bit of software that is way past end of life, but no one can get prioritized to upgrade, and has now become a blocker to every team.

Comments

slabgorb.com•32 days ago

I have in my career used Excel to write a bunch of INSERT statements in SQL

Whatever gets the job done

danmorgandesigns.bsky.social•31 days ago

He has a lot of the original Excel spreadsheets which helps a ton getting those tables into html tables. Pictures and text have to be harvested out of the PDFs by hand.

danmorgandesigns.bsky.social•31 days ago

I have a co-worker who has been with the company over 35 years. He’s built a huge collection (>500) of PDFs produced using Excel for the layout and table data. Lots of text too.

My side project for the last 18 months has been pulling the text and tables and getting them into a wiki knowledge base.

austingovella.bsky.social•31 days ago

I have seen high fidelity wireframes designed in Excel. And used like that.

To design an app that helped shift millions of dollars a month.

ishyamo.bsky.social•31 days ago

One of my previous employers insisted on everything being done in Microsoft Word or Excel - everything. I’m scarred for life.

michaelklein.io•31 days ago

That's such a stupid thing to say.
It's google sheets

spavel.bsky.social•31 days ago

Google sheets is your company's Excel

marypcbuk.bsky.social•31 days ago

Pffft; PowerPoint (I designed so many prototype page layouts in PowerPoint at AOL)

spavel.bsky.social•31 days ago

Layout tools are documentation, not design

marypcbuk.bsky.social•31 days ago

Is undocumented design anything more than a pretty napkin?

spavel.bsky.social•31 days ago

Mental models

ygrene.bsky.social•31 days ago

not design but i once managed a $500 million product category with an Excel capability i built myself because we wouldn’t invest in resources to build it in a system lol

spavel.bsky.social•31 days ago

Surprise! Everything is design

mmacleod.ca•31 days ago

Excel is the real Everything App and nothing else comes close. All of finance, design, project management, documentation…

Hell, the other day I saw someone sharing exactly json payloads in xlsx.

spavel.bsky.social•31 days ago

JSON payloads, as in Intercontinental ballistic

mmacleod.ca•31 days ago

The real shocking thing was when I started laughing the guy doing the presentation copy/pasted it out to a regular text doc and the pretty print formatting was well preserved. I’m still mystified why it was in xlsx in the first place, but it worked better than it had any right to.

vcbrannen.bsky.social•31 days ago

when i worked in the art department at a newspaper, we once had a client submit their “press-ready” ad built in Excel. colored cells and fonts and images and all. it was not the worst designed ad we ever received.

matthewrdangle.com•30 days ago

Its an everything tool! I've seen designers use it to make games… and some companies as their primary database.

spavel.bsky.social•30 days ago

Everything is design

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply