TIL spreadsheet risk is a whole subfield of what probably should be called bitrot studies ht eusprig.org/horror-stories
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Spreadsheets are one of those things where the risk seems ordinary if you just use an isolated one individually for a problem, but turns into a WMD at an exponential rate as you add more people and data connections
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Is there a standard scaling regimes sequence? Something like
Paper
PDF
Text file/word doc
Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet++ on cloud
No code db thing like knack
Quick and dirty web app db like SQLite
Proper db and warehouses
Big data nosql/newsql db
Big cloud distributed db things
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Clearly you haven’t seen how bad things can get
I've seen people scrape data out of pdfs for analysis when it ended up getting used as archival form
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Maybe. It's just that everything else on the list is read/write, while PDF is read only (In theory. Hopefully. If you aren't dealing with a lawyer. In a sane world).
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Also many ocr/scanning workflows produce pdf, so when integrating large legacy archives in old orgs, you end up with pdf
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