Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The real problem is of course using Excel to maintain data. That's not what it's for. That's what databases are for. Excel is for complex calculations over rows and columns. I use MS Excel extensively and create new .xlsx files every week even though I know databases like SQLite, MySQL, and did consulting for Oracle RDBMS. The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing . And even though I also k…
> The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing. Exactly. It baffles me that such a tool still doesn't exist (though elsewhere someone claimed that MS Access is like this; I'm not familiar with it). Keeping this in the cloud, with a web-based Excel-like interface, where you can share it with anyone you choose, but keep a single source of truth, I think that would be incredibly useful and solve t…
The are a ton of benefits to enforcing data integrity like data types, foreign keys, etc., but it also adds a ton of friction. Users encounter tons of frustrating errors while simply copying and pasting things, because certain values aren't allowed in certain columns.
I think you'd need human-readable datatypes displayed beneath each column name, adjustable by just clicking it and changing it in the drop-down, and massive flexibility out of the box. You shouldn't throw hard errors - just visually mark the invalid values red or pink or whatever, and let the user fix then before writing them to the database.