I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.
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They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
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The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
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This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
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Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.
Am I getting it correctly that the excel sheet was basically a form to fill in, with fields and labels, but as a spreadsheet? If so, that sounds pretty clever to me - there’re many better ways to do this, but if everybody working there has excel anyways, that’s a fast and easy way to get the data in a unified and automatable format without any extra infrastructure.
Nope. Like “what to get for the company party? A, B or C”.
Workflow: open excel sheet to know what it is about, save it, edit it, drag&drop it to the answer-mail. That could have been one of the zilions of online polling tools.
If it was a single question, that does sound lame, my other thought was that those “online polling tools” might not be viable because you can’t put internal company communications into them… But if it’s stuff like food choices or something, then that might also not be a problem.
That said, my point still stands - what you describe does sound like what I’m saying. If you make a sheet with a dedicated field to put the answer into, it should be possible to reliably automate pulling out answers from all the files with excel-level knowledge, and without any additional sites or servers, just spreadsheet editing software and email.