I did a stint in document management for a company.
Let me disagree: All of Office is a very very very bad thing from a "shared information" standpoint. If you put information into an office document/spreadsheet/etc, it effectively locks it from use in the rest of the company, publishing, and programmatic analysis.
Suuuuure, there's lots of products out there that will offer services to extract data from your word docs, or all that adhoc data in your spreadsheet.
Extracting data from word documents is definitely in the "with a million lines of code you can do anything" camp. It's just a lot of ugly crap but its doable.
But... why?
Why have companies allowed Microsoft to make their storage formats utterly inaccessible and integration resistant? Well, it made them mints of money in monopolizing/stopping switchover to competitors, and allowed them to make money on the tools to extract/use their insufferable storage formats.
Soooo much efficiency lost.
Excel the programming and UI app is an amazing achievement (here's to Lotus 123 for making the first spreadsheet, as with everything, Microsoft didn't create it, it copied it).
But for a data creation, manipulation, and "database", it is a tragedy.
Let me disagree: All of Office is a very very very bad thing from a "shared information" standpoint. If you put information into an office document/spreadsheet/etc, it effectively locks it from use in the rest of the company, publishing, and programmatic analysis.
Suuuuure, there's lots of products out there that will offer services to extract data from your word docs, or all that adhoc data in your spreadsheet.
Extracting data from word documents is definitely in the "with a million lines of code you can do anything" camp. It's just a lot of ugly crap but its doable.
But... why?
Why have companies allowed Microsoft to make their storage formats utterly inaccessible and integration resistant? Well, it made them mints of money in monopolizing/stopping switchover to competitors, and allowed them to make money on the tools to extract/use their insufferable storage formats.
Soooo much efficiency lost.
Excel the programming and UI app is an amazing achievement (here's to Lotus 123 for making the first spreadsheet, as with everything, Microsoft didn't create it, it copied it).
But for a data creation, manipulation, and "database", it is a tragedy.