Worksheet Sandwiches

Every business has a legacy system. 

Mine started as a warm, comforting worksheet sandwich — layered formulas, VBA toppings, and a creamy side of M‑Query. It was delicious. It solved a real problem. It fed everyone who needed it.

But then the orders kept coming.

More employees. 

More services. 

More exceptions. 

More “Can you add this one thing?”

Suddenly my little spreadsheet deli turned into a 24‑hour kitchen.

I kept stacking ingredients:

extra employee sauce 

spicy manager data 

medical‑director contract slices 

a drizzle of commission logic 

a garnish of reporting tabs 

It was messy, aromatic, alive — the kind of complexity you can actually taste once it lands in a form people can digest.

But here’s the part nobody warns you about.

Food spoils.

The sandwich grew too big to fit in the fridge. 

Half‑wrapped sheets leaked formulas onto other sheets. 

Old logic curdled when new data types walked in. 

Some tabs went stale. 

Some calculations fermented into bugs.

I’d open the workbook and smell the sourness of something left out too long.

So I’d refactor. 

And refactor again. 

And again.

Some nights I worked straight through until morning, scraping off moldy assumptions, rebuilding layers so the whole thing wouldn’t collapse.

And just when I’d finish…

the lunch rush hit.

Employees clocking in. 

Managers checking numbers. 

Reports being pulled. 

Everyone consuming the entire sandwich in minutes, leaving worksheet crumbs everywhere.

That was the moment I knew:

This kitchen wasn’t going to survive another season.

It was time to industrialize.

Time to move from a makeshift spreadsheet deli to a fully relational SQL kitchen — stainless steel, temperature‑controlled, scalable, clean, built to serve thousands of orders a day without spoiling.

That’s why I’m building Lissora.

Not to shame the old recipes. 

But to honor them — by giving them a real kitchen, real tools, and a future where they don’t rot under their own success.

Legacy isn’t failure. 

Legacy is the smell of something cooked so many times it outgrew the pan.

And I’ve lived every bit of it.