Good god. Can you imagine how long it takes just to load that damn spreadsheet? Just another example of technology being used in places it should not be. Its not even an access database (eww) just excel.
Archive: https://archive.today/nyU86
From the post: "There's a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he's eager to shake things up. He's been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.
Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested."
MS_Paint to CAD their parts? Some autist from the chans could pull it off.
an IPB Illustrated Parts Breakdown
They should have used LibreOffice Calc.
God forbid they try to filter and sort. Or allow multiple people access. Must be an insane nightmare.
and if it was constrained to one person access wouldn't life suck to be THAT person
How much you want to bet that spreadsheet is decades old.
It probably started out as a project by some "new guy" or "intern" and they really loved it.. When it was tracking about 200 parts.
Well... It did not age well and no one wanted to spend the effort to properly input them into any number of free OSS tools that are DB backed and 100x easier to use. So.. It became the monster that it is today.
There is no longer lasting solution than a temporary fix.
Hah. That reminds me of something. "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program".
Im stealing that
Access would have said fuck you many rows and columns ago...
The reason they use(d) Excel is simple; everything exports, or can export, to CSV or some other text file. Excel excels at that kind of file. So what better way to put everything in one location for the bosses to review it?
the problem is with adds, changes and deletes are going to be a nightmare
That is a good point.. But I doubt that they have ever done that or even know that option exists.. Since they are tracking 20k parts with excel.
No, that's probably how that monstrosity was created. Someone requested a single file with everything ordered, prices, dates, status, etc. and that request birthed this monster that they have today. I'd bet some money (less than $20) that it started from a section manager using it to keep track of his orders, his boss decried everyone else should consolidate and add their data to it because the format was easily read. Someone higher up liked it and then applied it team/company wide. That's how these things come to be.
Oh man. Im going to have to stop following the replies. You are giving me nightmares......
Sounds like someone screwed up the Excel File From Hell - https://racer.com/2024/03/22/williams-situation-unacceptable-in-modern-day-formula-1-vowles/
Does Formula1 use some kind of illustrated parts breakdown
I know Snap On has a system for checking in and out tools but I cant remember what it was
(post is archived)