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Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

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Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#31

Post by ndespres »

amichal wrote: post #20
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

Excel remains one of my most used pieces of software, and one where I feel like any education/training has re-paid for itself multiple times over. The more you learn, the more productive you are (and sometimes more informed, thanks to data visualizations). OneNote (desktop) and Excel are the only two pieces of Microsoft Office that I regularly continue to use. They're the only reason I license it. Microsoft Word afte…

i recently got burned because at some point in the last few years Excel decided it would be better if it attempted to use localized thousands and decimal separators. item,cost,currency "Socks",1.234,USD Represents socks costing about a dollar in countries that use '.' as a decimal (most) and about a thousand dollars in countries that use a ','. In locales using a decimal period '.' double clicking will open the CSV j…

I have long suspected that Excel's treatment of CSV files was intentionally antagonistic. For example, opening a CSV file will start an importer function where you must specify how fields are delimited within the file, and "comma" is not automatically selected, ever, despite "comma-separated" being literally named in the file extension.

Surely the folks programming it are not that short-sighted. It's just a punishment for not using their default format.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#32

Post by short_sells_poo »

stanrivers wrote: post #24

You know, being controversial here and coming from a finance perspective, I've wondered if Excel has done more harm than good to the finance / M&A / investing industries. Endless iterations, countless different scenarios, simulations of whatever what-if analysis you can think of, exact numbers to 10 decimal places... it all creates the perception of critical thinking and useful work. Often, again in finance and inves…

I don't know who or why is downvoting you. You are advancing a perfectly rational discussion and shame on anyone who just disagrees by downvote.

What you describe is an easy trap to fall into, doubly so in a world of imperfect and insufficient data like finance. You very rarely know the full picture and everything you work with is basically stochastic. Yet this stochastic nature can be easily hidden behind copious numbers that seem to add up. However, I'd like to avoid blaming the tool for this. Just as a hammer cannot be blamed just because it enables plenty of "craftsmen" to cobble together rubbish constructions.

Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I feel.

There's also a flipside I often encounter by the way: analysis paralysis. Data analysis - whether we talk about sexy data science with python, Julia, etc on huge cloud server clusters, or good old boring pivot tables in excel - means that a lot of stuff can now be analyzed in minute detail. I've seen so many efforts get bogged down in a depth first search of fractal-like problems because one can find new and surprising things no matter how deep they dig.

Again I think the issue is not the tools, but the practitioners who still have plenty of learning to do in producing concise results that are easy to digest. I consider this a form of art.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#33

Post by fulafel »

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #26

Pour one out for Visicalc, the precursor to Excel/Lotus and the 'killer app' of 1979 for the Apple II! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc Flash forward to 1997, and a key part of the deal for MS investing in Apple is...you guessed it, Excel on the mac. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY&t=2m0s Funny to think about next time some engineer is telling you how this or that new cloud software will 'totally rep…

> Like em or hate em, spreadsheets are here to stay.

Bold predicion!

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#34

Post by fredsted »

A little off-topic, but maybe someone can answer this. I sometimes use Excel when I want to see a CSV file formatted nicely, but apparently Excel has bad support for CSV files, opening them unparsed (e.g. each line of the CSV taking up a single cell.) Apparently you have to use the "Import CSV" wizard. When building apps that export CSVs, many times customers have had issues with special characters appearing weirdly, so I've needed to format the files using some sort of DOS character set.

Apple Numbers and Quick Look opens CSV files without any issues whatsoever.

Why is CSV support in Excel so poor?

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#35

Post by zokier »

amichal wrote: post #20
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

Excel remains one of my most used pieces of software, and one where I feel like any education/training has re-paid for itself multiple times over. The more you learn, the more productive you are (and sometimes more informed, thanks to data visualizations). OneNote (desktop) and Excel are the only two pieces of Microsoft Office that I regularly continue to use. They're the only reason I license it. Microsoft Word afte…

i recently got burned because at some point in the last few years Excel decided it would be better if it attempted to use localized thousands and decimal separators. item,cost,currency "Socks",1.234,USD Represents socks costing about a dollar in countries that use '.' as a decimal (most) and about a thousand dollars in countries that use a ','. In locales using a decimal period '.' double clicking will open the CSV j…

Modern excel is better at this because it has this "powerquery" thing integrated to csv import which allows bit more control how data is imported. The classic csv import is really bad though. It is bit hidden feature, you have to click "transform data" button when importing the file

Here is sort of some docs on it https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/import-or-export-... (section "Import a text file by connecting to it (Power Query)")

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