Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Not to criticize, honest question - If you're already doing VLOOKUP and INDEX type operations why not invest a little bit of time to learn how to do this stuff with a full blown relational database? It'd be faster performing, more scalable, more reliable, and teach students useful skills. I guess the only real issue would be a simple front end but that's not that bad to do any more…
Disclaimer - my bread and butter is databases, Postgres, SQL-Server, Mongo, CouchDB… When all you've got is a hammer every problem looks like a nail, I'm genuinely curious why so many people seem to shoehorn excel into a job for an actual DB.
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People/Resources. We can't dedicate programmers to this, and we're generally so short on programmers they are on the robot hte entire time.
Excel/Gdocs is a useful tool for ALL engineers, so in theory every student on the team should learn it.
A viable scouting system can be made in an hour easily if you're just doing averaging like most teams are. Less by an experienced user. You don't have to worry about potential errors/bugs you've introduced, etc... I don't buy the increased reliability argument.
Furthermore, the real big gain, is distribution. Every kid on the team has a google account, they have the scouting folder shared. Phones, tablets, laptops, etc... can all view it with no pain or hassle.
User interface as well, the UI is so much faster and easier to edit for people with no programming experience.
It has a lot of power for so little effort. It's the same reason why so many teams buy COTS shifters.