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My rules for using spreadsheets
A personal essay arguing that spreadsheets should mostly be avoided for anything large or complex, based on years of reviewing engineering firms' error-prone, inconsistently structured Excel files. The author outlines two narrow exceptions where spreadsheets are acceptable (very small, simple problems, or as a one-off staging area before exporting data) and then walks through a detour comparing Pandas and SQLite for grouping and summarizing the US baby names dataset, showing equivalent groupby/pivot-table style queries in both tools.
Source: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2026/08/my-rules-for-using-spreadsheets. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
