'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'.

Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of gangrenous melanoma.

On the other hand, some people are happy to say that the complexity of sophisticated Excel models means they would have been better off built in a code interface. Ha ha ha!

Even with the right mix of functional and object-oriented code and suitable documentation and version control applied to code, I respectfully disagree.

Data handling capabilities could benefit from skill in all of these tools: error checking (including analytical review); pen & paper; calculators; databases; spreadsheets; math & stat techniques; Word processors (& clear logical explanations).

Together, they form a rich menagerie of tools which will probably all be around until we have an AI that follows us around and we just tell it what we want. Actually, even then, it would be good to know them so that we can grasp the underlying logic and frame the concepts leading to the actions that we ask the AI to assist with...

I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them.

I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.

This is exactly what we are attempting to solve at nocodb : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb

Which is, nocodb gives you a google-drive like collaborative spreadsheets on your existing databases (MySQL, Postgres etc)

And the original problem in article could be countered with nocodb as we keep audit of all changes done to the database.