Happened to me 2 days ago, a friend’s wife had a corrupt XML file of an excel spreadsheet, she had worked on this for years and it was a huge deal supposedly and nobody in their IT department could “figure it out”. So they ask me and I was sent a picture of a screen of what it was supposed to look like and it was grainy and cropped up of course. This is work for a major corporation. I basically spent 20 minutes exacting all the XML data and figuring out a styleID for a column wasn’t declared somehow and that was 1 of a couple reasons for the error. I remove all that metadata and formatting then imported it all into a clean excel file. It was a spreadsheet for about 300 people and 6 columns of random data like where they’re located. I was told I should get a job in their IT department lol (I’m no computer scientist), but I was in awe. “You make a great salary, and have been working on this spreadsheet for 2 years? Wow, okay, good for you, go get ‘em, glad I could help you out lol.”
WTH?! If the data was so damn important why would anyone store it within a freaking Excel file?! I think that a CSV format would have been a much better way of keeping track of the data rather than worrying about what font family this cell is going to be in. Or maybe even a an actual SQL database! People make this shit so much more complicated than it needs to be when IT is actually a very boring job if you do it right.
That has actually kinda happened to me before. I asked for a screenshot of a PC and was emailed an iPhone photo of the screen.
Happened to me 2 days ago, a friend’s wife had a corrupt XML file of an excel spreadsheet, she had worked on this for years and it was a huge deal supposedly and nobody in their IT department could “figure it out”. So they ask me and I was sent a picture of a screen of what it was supposed to look like and it was grainy and cropped up of course. This is work for a major corporation. I basically spent 20 minutes exacting all the XML data and figuring out a styleID for a column wasn’t declared somehow and that was 1 of a couple reasons for the error. I remove all that metadata and formatting then imported it all into a clean excel file. It was a spreadsheet for about 300 people and 6 columns of random data like where they’re located. I was told I should get a job in their IT department lol (I’m no computer scientist), but I was in awe. “You make a great salary, and have been working on this spreadsheet for 2 years? Wow, okay, good for you, go get ‘em, glad I could help you out lol.”
WTH?! If the data was so damn important why would anyone store it within a freaking Excel file?! I think that a CSV format would have been a much better way of keeping track of the data rather than worrying about what font family this cell is going to be in. Or maybe even a an actual SQL database! People make this shit so much more complicated than it needs to be when IT is actually a very boring job if you do it right.