I'm stuck with several relatively new (2015, HD, run tvOS 16) Apple TVs that came from a government auction. They were used in a school, and were never removed from "Apple School Manager", their MDM system for schools. Apparently Apple can mark serials as part of a school or business's fleet, and upon setting up the device, it automatically is registered and pulls down the MDM profiles.
Only the school can remove them from the system, and although Apple's terms of service _require_ them to be in control of the device for it to be registered (i.e. not sold to a third party, me), I have been completely unable to convince the school to help me on the matter. Contacting Apple doesn't seem like much of an option either, as they don't even publicly post contact info for this kind of support.
You might want to play around with the encoding on your videos. On a Windows machine with a i7-8770k (and dedicated GPU) with Firefox latest, the page was spiking up to 100% GPU usage, causing the browsing experience to slow to a crawl. It may be related due to me having a Twitch stream up on a second display.
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
I was able to purchase a LTO-7 library full of tapes a few years ago for basically nothing, and still haven't gotten around to using it. There seems to be very little in terms of free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups. tar doesn't exactly cut it for hands-off usage.
The best I've found is using Veeam Backup & Replication, but it's Windows only and not great still.
That's fair. I used to use Ark, which was mostly a proprietary front-end for bacula, and that exposed me to the kind of futility of a "user-friendly" tape interface. Every tape operation from picking to winding to r/w takes so much time, and has so many subtle ways that it can fail, that it defies attempts at friendly user interfaces.
Bacula is great software, but yes, fiddly to set up and SCSI tape drives / changers aren't really straightforward either. It will serve you well once all is set up though.
I worked for a company using Bacula quite successfully for many years with a 24 tape system. It was much better than the proprietary software the system came with.
For backups I'm using BareOS, which is a fork of Bacula. For archival... We wrote our own software, which is mostly free (AGPL3). I should give our github some love though :)
https://github.com/Intellique
It's very useful information when you are never rested and constantly are trying to tweak variables to observe the impacts to your sleep. I've long since stopped relying on trackers, however, as nothing seemed to display any accuracy whatsoever. I manually record my perception of sleep every night.
It seems that there are few options overall, but particularly few OSS options for doing offline storage and sync in native code (_without_ using JavaScript). The only thing I've encountered that really met those requirements (OSS, non-JS) was Couchbase, but it's really not a great experience, and requires complicated setup both for the binary and the server. Adding P2P or CRDT features is even more difficulty.
I'm very happy you found something that works for you. What method of ketamine treatment have you been taking? I just stopped after 2 months of troches, which didn't seem to bring significant, if any, benefit.
Interestingly, I found myself abnormally susceptible to the psychedelic effects. When taking ketamine orally, the expectation is that most of the medicine is absorbed while you hold the troch in your mouth for 30+ minutes. After a lot of experimentation, I found that I barely absorb any medicine through my mouth, but once I swallow it I absorb it very rapidly. This made it difficult to control the delivery speed, and likely hindered my treatment.
I haven't been dealing with depression for anywhere near as long as you, but I do speak from experience about how terrible it is to not find anything that works. I've gone through ~13 of the most commonly prescribed drugs for depression, anxiety, and sleep, and none brought any relief. I've now tried and failed out of ketamine, which I was really hopeful for. Now I'm just back to sitting around trying to get _any_ doctor to actually see me and maybe get tested for various neurodivergent conditions.
Every treatment had slightly different results, but only 1 offered me any kind of significant moments.
The most commonly repeated imagery was usually geometric patterns (usually in a glowing neon, accompanied with an EDM auditory hallucination as well), and old-fashioned TV static.
I refer to these sessions as 'brain rewiring'.
The singular significant moment was a quiet nothingness. All the voices stopped. All the inner talk stopped. I can best describe it as:
cat BRAIN >/dev/null
It was incredible, and the only true inner peace I have ever felt.
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you.
I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. (I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different). For example, it is very non-intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all the rows in another sheet that match this rule, and once you do that, since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.
I realize most people don't have the luxury or skills, but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet.
After this experience, I can't help but wonder if Excel and spreadsheets largely exist due to pre-existing knowledge about how to use them, or if this is _actually_ the best way for non-programming minded people to solve these problems.
Google Sheets is pretty basic compared to Excel in terms of the kinds of data analysis and queries it permits (without dropping into another language). Excel added tables over a decade ago that allow for some very useful and much cleaner query and data analysis stuffs in straight Excel. Then there are power queries and pivot tables, not sure how long those two have been around but last I used Google Sheets it had nothing like either.
My point being, don't judge spreadsheets by Google Sheets. Actually use Excel and you'll see a much more capable system and get a better understanding of why people (particularly non-programmers in business settings) stick with it.
EDIT: Pivot tables are in Google Sheets, so either I missed them before or they were added after I last gave it a serious look. My google-fu is not discovering the date they were added.
I ran into this... last year when trying to do something with excel (I forget what excactly, apart from it needing joins and some analysis between several datasets).
It felt so unintuative with the tables "embedded" into sheets, it feels like they should be a sheet or a table, not both.
Power queries seemed a really neat tool for non-coders to munge data as needed.
PowerQuery. It's a tool built into Excel. It's a GUI that wraps an almost purely-functional DSL designed for ETL and data munging, called the M language. You can either use the GUI or write the code directly. It has first class functions and closures and normies are programming in it. It's great. More people should know about it.
Btw it's kind of funny seeing so many HN users, many of whom must be working on software that competes with Excel either directly or indirectly, who are so unknowing of the full capabilities of Excel, capabilities that are the bread and butter of any e.g. financial analyst, or logistics manager, or any smart non-programmer white collar worker. Maybe this "hacker repulsion field" is the secret of its dominance -- you can't compete with it if you never learn what it can do.
Your aside is exactly why I wanted to use a spreadsheet. It's the only tool that has that market penetration for non-programmers, and I wanted to see what made it tick. It seems like that may have backfired by not using Excel, however.
If you enable PowerPivot (hidden in the COM addons settings) you'll get a quite capable data analysis tool for small-ish data with M + DAX with some rough edges.
They're the only reason I actually like to use Excel now. PowerBI has those natively built-in in a more modern iteration but is not as flexible (little direct data entry capability). That said PBI is ultimately meant for reporting.
I would love to understand more what limitations you faced with GSheets that are non-existent in Excel. I used to think the same but then I built some pretty complex computations in GSheets that I could not easily replicate in Excel. And U have built some complex stuff in both.
Extending on this, if you want to make really powerful business software — ingest and emit Excel sheets that other departments can use in their own flows.
PowerQuery is powerful, but also compromised by the fact it is so closely tied to Excel. If you want to do data transformation tasks (such as joins) on your Excel data and you don't want to learn R or Python+Pandas then you might be better off doing it in a no-code tool designed explicitly for the task, for example Alteryx (if you have deep pockets) or Easy Data Transform (if you don't).
There is another reason that is less often openly disclosed, but very much in play. I recently proposed RStudio or Python/Panda combo to deal with some of the limitations of Excel ( which also conveniently bypasses Alteryx's cost ), but the response I got was somewhat surprising, because it revolved around and I am paraphrasing 'will others be able to learn and use it'. And here is the rub. Excel has a lot of online tutorials and in some ways it is a known quantity. And, well, some people don't want to learn new thingsshrug.
No code data wrangling tools are significantly easier to learn than R or Python+Pandas. That is their main selling point (inevitably they trade some flexibility for this) and there is a range of them to cover all budgets.
> My point being, don't judge spreadsheets by Google Sheets.
I've used Google Sheets for years and greatly prefer it over Excel at this point. The killer feature is the sharing, which Excel does not do unless Microsoft 365 has greatly changed. The graphics, pivot tables, and functions are entirely sufficienty for cash flow and revenue models.
Seriously doubt Google Sheets lacks powerful features that Excel has (except niche features). Why would the developers intentionally cripple their product? It's not like any common operations on table data is too challenging for the Sheets team to implement. If there's any real difference between the softwares it's in their respective focus.
Not intentionally cripple. It takes years to get to feature parity even with laser focus. If that focus isn't there (deciding Sheets has a slightly different positioning in the market for instance) it's not getting to feature parity.
Excel has some functionality that Google Sheets are missing that is used in this particular use case. More specifically, it has a primitive called Table. After you set up your data as Tables, you can then reference whole columns as Table1[Column1] and it also fills your formulas down as you add more rows.
I don't want to defend Excel too much, as it is not ideal in many ways. Nevertheless, over time, I found myself using it more and more to prototype and visualize data. With magic features like Pivot charts, Flash fill, and Data tables you can hammer out a one-off "app" in a matter of minutes.
Google has, for better or worse (and I'd argue usually for better), created a 90-95% product across Word/Sheets/Slides. Every now and then I run into limitations but the sparseness is mostly a win. That said, every now and then I run into a limitation (perhaps especially with Excel) that I have to either work around or use the Microsoft product.
Someone who has extensive experience in Excel but only basic knowledge in software development will quickly realize that they can develop something in Excel faster than they can build it in a CRUD app.
I think this raises another point. An apples-to-apples comparison is only possible if you can do both yourself. If you're not a coder, then you're comparing creating a spreadsheet with managing coding. And the latter is even more difficult to learn than coding itself.
I'm in the middle ground -- can code until the cows come home, but can't manage a coding project to save my life. I am extremely sympathetic when someone has to manage me coding. I'm always thinking to myself: How can I avoid turning this into a nightmare for them?
I certainly get that, but I'm primarily pointing out that as a non-layman from the software side, it doesn't seem like a particularly amazing tool. It certainly could be the case that it's extremely good for non-programmers, I was simply pointing out that I naively think it's not very well designed for those usecases.
Can you give a more detailed description of what you were trying? I can't know for sure, but it sounds like Excel can easily handle what you've described, if you use it right.
>the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance.
How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.
>(I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different).
It would have been very different, because Excel has tables and Powerquery and Google Sheets doesn't.
>since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.
Were you using dynamic array formulae? They can handle the old problem of needing to fill down formulae to an arbitrary depth. Or again, tables.
Programmers routinely underestimate Excel. Unlike most Microsoft products, it has improved year on year over the past few decades. There are heaps of great power-user features they keep introducing. The skill ceiling is very high .. not as high as proper software engineering, but still damned high.
It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel in LibreOffice Calc" -- no you fucking well cannot. (And I use Linux on my personal computers full time).
> It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel in LibreOffice Calc" -- no you fucking well cannot. (And I use Linux on my personal computers full time).
It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task.
Unless you can come up with an example task that can't be completed, then it seems like it's just a matter of opinion which is the better solution.
As far as I know both Google Sheets and LibreOffice have SQL and Pivot Tables, and -- believe it or not -- Lotus 1-2-3 had "/Data queries" in 1989. Naturally, the queries possible in 1-2-3 were limited, but you really could query large tables for things like "[Date] <= #date(2017,6,1)", which is the first result I got from typing "Power Query example statement" into Google.
Lotus 1-2-3 had a Solver (two actually, one called "Solver" and one called "What-If") in 1989. Yes, LibreOffice has one too.
Does Microsoft tell their customers they invented these features? Just a few days ago I saw a Windows developer who thought Microsoft invented conditional breakpoints.
>It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task.
It's true that Google sheets and LibreOffice don't have Powerquery, and that's a big pain. But the worse thing is that they don't have tables. As in, the "format as table" button in Excel. As in, the bread and butter of anyone who gets serious work done in Excel.
Maybe it's a problem of naming -- "format" makes people think it's just about aesthetics, but actually it imparts real semantic structure onto a rectangular grid of data. It also isn't the same thing as pivot tables, with which they are often confused. It gives the grid a name that you can refer to in formulae, and the columns are named too, with their names living inside the table namespace ("structured references" is what Microsoft calls it). The table automatically expands its boundaries when you start typing a column header to the right of the current columns, and likewise it expands to comprise the row beneath it if you type values into that row. And it has smart indexing: there's special syntax to refer to "this table" and "this row" in formulae.
So you can have say, a table named "ExpensesTable", labelled "Date", "Type of Expense" and "Amount" in columns A:C. Then you can type "Tax" at the top of column D, it will expand the table to include a new blank column for Tax. Then in D2, type
=[@[Amount]] * 0.2
and it will automatically fill down the Tax column with 20% of the value of the Amount columns. Then in a cell outside the table, do
=sum(ExpensesTable[Amount])
to get the total amount of expenses. These are both simple examples; you can do more complex and interesting things involving multiple columns, ranges of columns, joins, etc. The point is the semantic structure that makes your spreadsheet more than just a rectangular soup of cells, so you don't have to claw through endless cryptic "G70:$K100" cell references. If we add a new row or column, we don't have to alter any formulae at all; the bounds are automatically resized on the cell arrays that the column names refer to. Think of it like a mutable resizable dataframe. It's the core data structure of an efficient, scalable, maintainable Excel document.
And no, I have no idea why the eggheads at Google don't implement this for Sheets. Maybe Microsoft has a patent on it? Wouldn't surprise me. But this is why you'll have to pry Excel out of spreadsheet jockeys' cold dead hands -- the alternatives don't have this basic thing.
You need to come up with a task that cannot be accomplished, remember you said "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", but so far I've seen no examples.
I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you?
You can replicate the exact example you gave with named ranges. If there is something it can do that named ranges can't, then please use that example instead. Similarly, if you think there is something that "Power Query" can do that SQL cannot, then please show that.
I literally use Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX (I'm not kidding! http://123r3.net).
So far, all of the examples I've seen you give could have been done in 1989 on a VT100 terminal connected to SystemV. You could even write a quick macro in that generates the named ranges from column headers with one keystroke, it would be really trivial.
>I mean, isn't this just a button that adds some named ranges for you?
No, named ranges don't automatically expand when you add new rows, and they aren't automatically created when you add new columns. And they don't remain in groups, e.g. you can't make a reference like Namedrange1:Namedrange3, but in a table you can do Column1:Column3. Named ranges exist in a global namespace; column references exist in a per-table namespace. The table syntax makes columnwise operations clearer to express in formulae. Let's say you want to refer to the cell in the same row as the current cell, but in a different column: how do you do that if everything is just a named range? You need to do some kind of juggling with indexing and lookups, or else fall back to alphabet soup A1/R1C1 style referencing, because a named range is only good if you want to do an operation on every cell in the range. But that's often not what you want! In tables it's as simple as [@[other column]].
You would know this if you actually read the documentation or watched the video I posted. Or I could just repeat myself again (maybe I will write a macro to automate such tedium).
>Similarly, if you think there is something that "Power Query" can do that SQL cannot, then please show that.
Grab data from a csv file, a JSON file, a SQL database, and an Excel sheet, and combine them all together using a normie-friendly GUI.
Your question doesn't even make sense, it's like a type error. SQL and PowerQuery are not competing technologies, they're complementary.
>You could even write a quick macro in that generates the named ranges from column headers with one keystroke, it would be really trivial.
Yeah and you can also make Dropbox by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Spreadsheets are the only remaining programming system that people not inducted into the Programming Cult use.
I'm happy that you like this syntax, but the claim you made was "no you fucking well cannot [do everything]", not "excel syntax is more fucking beautiful".
I appreciate your advice, but I don't need to watch a video on R1C1 syntax, I literally maintain a spreadsheet :)
It seems like your real claim is that you really like the way Excel does it, nobody can argue with that.
I have to agree with the OP (_dain_) here. Excel has evolved a lot in the last few years, first the whole Power Query and Power Pivot revolution and now all the functional stuff brought on by Simon Peyton-Jones and his crew like LET expressions and the functional constructs like LAMBDA, MAP, FILTER, ...
There's very little you can't do neatly and efficiently in Excel anymore. Yes you can in principle do those same things in Google Shets, but at what cost of readability?
I don't think it's worth spending much time getting into these arguments because the people arguing against Excel clearly don't know modern Excel very well.
> I don't think it's worth spending much time getting into these arguments because the people arguing against Excel clearly don't know modern Excel very well.
That's not it at all. Excel has been in active development for over 30 years by a multi-trillion dollar development powerhouse with billions of sales, everybody is aware it's a perfectly competent product.
The dispute is the objective claim that it can do something that alternatives cannot, not the subjective claim that Excel is "neater", or more beautiful, or more user friendly. After 30 years of active development I would hope that Excel has some shortcuts, polish and syntax improvements to streamline common operations. That is not the same as not being able to do something.
I question the claim that it can do something unique, and want to hear an example. When pushed for an example I'm told that only Excel has a Solver, or only Excel has Pivot Tables. That is objectively false.
I don't want to hear about "Power Query" unless it's an example query that cannot be done in SQL. It's a proprietary query language, of course alternatives don't have it. I'm glad you're happy about it, but others might call that "Vendor Lock-in".
Your comment about FOSS is spot on. While I'm very aware that Google Sheets is not OSS, it felt much more amenable to me than Excel (and I'm sure Excel's online free version isn't particularly fantastic anyway, though it may be better than Sheets from what people are saying here).
> How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.
This was a bit overloaded in my opinion, as in spreadsheets world, "shape" includes the number of rows, hence my comments. I know that the column layout needs to be known.
> Were you using dynamic array formulae
I looked into it, but couldn't figure out how to handle them without introducing a massive amount of formula duplication. The best I could figure out how to do was to do a single large FILTER (which is dynamic array) and doing a fill down on my other transformation formulas from there. I blacked out the rows past the end of the FILTER using conditional formatting rules (which felt very stupid to do, but I couldn't find anything better).
> The skill ceiling is very high
I don't doubt you, but if you can't discover the functionality, it might as well not exist. Admittedly I was clearly using the inferior tool, but in my searching for solutions I much more readily found Google's documentation over Excel's.
I also realize I'm not in the position of being forced into a corner; as most of us on this forum could, I just wave my magic wand and write the software to solve my problems. I imagine those who don't have that ability available to them will do "crazier and crazier" things to figure out how to accomplish their work in Excel, and therefore will learn much better ways than I have in my little experience with it.
----
I was building a tool to track the completion of finding parts for a given Lego set. You enter the set ID, it pulls the parts list for that set (Rebrickable nicely offers their database as a set of CSVs https://rebrickable.com/downloads/) and formats it nicely for consumption.
tldr your problem with Excel is that you don't grok tables. They eliminate the need to know the number of rows when writing your formulae.
I don't actually have Excel installed on the machine I'm using to type this, so I can't put my money where my mouth is like the vim guy did[1]. But I'm fairly sure you can achieve your goal with table references and liberal use of the XLOOKUP and FILTER functions. It'll get a little hairy since you have to go from Set -> Inventories -> Inventory Parts -> Parts, so maybe a bit of nesting. But I think doable. The LET function also helps to reduce formula complexity, it lets you make lexically-scoped variables inside your formulae. Use "data validation" to make a dropdown menu for the set names.
The problems you mentioned are solved by Excel using tables, which are named, variable in size, and can be referenced by column names instead of addresses.
Tables can also be joined and queried using Power Query.
Excel is still 100x more powerful and sophisticated than Sheets is.
That's exactly what I did. Now separate out some columns and perform some additional transformation on that FILTERed data. Can you do it without repeating yourself (duplicating the FILTER statement, or any of the other transformations you need to do, besides just filling down a column). Can you perform these transformations only on the row height of the data, and not have extra rows with broken formulas?
I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if the functionality to do the above does exist, but for all of my searching I couldn't find it.
I will ramble a bit, but for complex data transforms, you can use PowerQuery instead of formulas. For semi-serious programmers like myself, I started doing C# add-ins to Excel using Excel-Dna. There’s also Query Storm. :)
Surely that's what lots of non-developer white collar workers use Excel for? I imagine there's orders of magnitude more people using Excel for data processing rather than Python or R. I'm well aware it's not the best tool for the job, but yet people are using it for purposes such as that. I wanted to learn more about that experience.
I think no. Most people don't do table joins very often. They wouldn't know how. What they'll do instead is create lookups with VLOOKUP or INDEX(MATCH()) to pull in values from other tables into their one master. And once they have the master flat file they'll use a pivot table for group by aggregations.
It's much simpler than all that. Excel is just easy to use and quick to get results and powerful enough to extend, easy to share with others, and is a broadly accepted file format. That's why it works. Everything else is more complicated, more vendor-locked in and takes longer to get results or requires more technical skills than the average Excel user has. Is it the best for everything? No. But it's damn good enough for a LOT of things. Its survival is proof.
Many people have tried launching an Excel-with-SQL-querying product, but it’s extremely hard to do the UI well. Also products where people write SQL are impossible to insure.
Your task could be trivially done with EasyMorph (https://easymorph.com). We've designed it exactly for such use cases.
Data needs of non-technical people have long been neglected. It was believed that any data wrangling should be done by IT people. So all non-technical people had was Excel. Luckily, the no-code movement finally started addressing that issue with a varying degree of success.
I work in financial services and have build prototypes with Excel that are now multi-million dollar revenue providers (implemented properly).
Excel is powerful in this respect because it is a shared experience. Build something with SAS/R/Python, explaining the results is possible but getting buy-in from other teams is harder.
>I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance.
Just record yourself finding the bottom of the data set (Ctrl + down arrow), then take a moment to make the code work in relative terms instead of absolute terms.
What do you mean by this? What am I "recording" as the bottom of the data set?
My point was that it is very hard to have a dynamic number of rows feed a proportionate dynamic number of rows. Scripting makes it much simpler, but at least with Google Sheet's scripting, the API seemed pretty lacking for that processing (in the very least, it's very slow, since it's running as a very constrained shared resource).
Excel let's you create macros by hitting "record" and then doing the operations yourself. It'll generate the code to replicate the impact of your inputs.
I don’t know about GSheets, but Excel has dynamic arrays (of variable lengths) since at least two years ago. Or a couple of lines of VBA can accomplish the same.
> but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet.
What would you use to build a CRUD app faster than an excel app
as somebody who is very experienced with both writing crud apps and excel there's still a lot of cases where excel wins. a big one for me is making m&a models, stuff like that, excel is better bc you can organize view and move around data, re run calculations, whatever else in a tighter loop. and it's better at taking data in kinda inconsistent formats. there's a reason it is still king of IB, PE, all the finance world.
this is because excel was "low/no code" before it was a tech meme with vc money.
Exactly right about the seeing the data and rerunning calculations.
The programmers who look down their nose at Excel are doing the exact same thing in Jupyter Notebooks and in their REPLs.
>I can see the state of any given variable at any time
>I can rerun the same function on different inputs, or different functions on the same inputs
>All without having to restart my program!
Remind you of anything?
Anybody who does print(df.head()) is pining for Excel…
This stings. I work as one of the less-technical people in group of developers and maintain a fairly extensive flat-file database in Excel. I wanted to re-implement it in Access, but my boss said "No," because he was afraid if I left he wouldn't be able to find anyone to maintain it.
Also, Access isn't available with all Microsoft Office licenses. Excel is.
What are you doing at this time (not meant as judgement or pressure)? I'm at a year (intentionally) unemployed, and I'm still not at the point where I feel like I can make meaningful progress on the projects I want to work on.
I can't really foresee a way that will get me going again, and I don't know that I really want to. I feel ashamed that my wife is now working, for less pay and objectively harder, when I could be making twice as much.
Only the school can remove them from the system, and although Apple's terms of service _require_ them to be in control of the device for it to be registered (i.e. not sold to a third party, me), I have been completely unable to convince the school to help me on the matter. Contacting Apple doesn't seem like much of an option either, as they don't even publicly post contact info for this kind of support.