We had a telco vendor use excel to manage all their configuration.
It was a weird dual source of authority system, where the excel configuration was used at install / upgrade time, but you could change the config after the install at runtime. So you had to merge the active configuration into excel, upload the excel document to some server that customers didn't have access to that turned the excel file into a config file, then you could use that config file to upgrade the system.
It was as problematic as you could imagine, lost configuration, lots of macros, etc. Eventually they made some improvements, but I left the industry so don't know what the current status is.
I'm not surprised. I've seen all kind of shit working for enterprise clients. Only one of them adhered to very high standards and had processes for everything. They were a military contractor and most of the clients were ex-military.
It was a weird dual source of authority system, where the excel configuration was used at install / upgrade time, but you could change the config after the install at runtime. So you had to merge the active configuration into excel, upload the excel document to some server that customers didn't have access to that turned the excel file into a config file, then you could use that config file to upgrade the system.
It was as problematic as you could imagine, lost configuration, lots of macros, etc. Eventually they made some improvements, but I left the industry so don't know what the current status is.
Enterprise / Telecom solutions at their best.