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Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

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Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#41

Post by Someone1234 »

fredsted wrote: post #34

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,…

> Why is CSV support in Excel so poor?

CSV isn't a proprietary Microsoft format. In fact worse: It competes with Microsoft's proprietary formats.

Microsoft would like everyone to be sending data to one another using xlsx, but not so much that they'll make generation/processing libraries and tooling free cross-platform, just enough to sabotage everything that isn't that.

Microsoft made these decisions during their "evil" years, and never back-tracked. So regardless that CSV is used in multiple industries for data exchange (e.g. financial, order/invoicing, scientific, etc) they'll just keep on corrupting them until you use what they want you to use.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#42

Post by avens19 »

I've always thought that Excel is the greatest piece of software ever written. The ease of entry, the extensibility, the impressive collection of built-in tools/formulas/charts. It gave regular people the ability to do data analysis and in so doing became perhaps the most ubiquitous business tool in the world aside from email. Happy birthday, Excel.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#43

Post by stanrivers »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #32
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 nu…

100% agree with everything you said.

Excel itself is never the problem. It user error, and sometimes even "boss of the user error," that leads to both situations you describe - analysis paralysis and overreliance.

I call out the "boss" concept because as some people get away from what leads to the numbers that are ultimately output to aid in the decision making, they can sometimes rely on the numbers too heavily relative to other, less "hard" but more important qualitative factors. It also can become an expectation that "robust analysis" is always conducted, and the time required outweighs the value created.

Obviously not always the case, but just a tendency you see in things like investment banking, corporate business development, private equity, venture capital even ---

For the record - without excel my job would be nearly impossible, so I love it. I just took the chance (and am getting the downvotes for it) to put a reminder out there for the less hard-data centric fields you should always add critical thinking to what is an impressive tool.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#46

Post by taxcoder »

fredsted wrote: post #34

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,…

My assumption is that it is a low priority format for MS. Perhaps because it does not further .xls / .xlsx lockin, perhaps because most ordinary users rarely need to open a .csv file.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#48

Post by amichal »

zokier wrote: post #35
amichal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 connecti…

I've always wanted to investigate if there is a current way to do this on a URL without resorting to scripting but have never really gotten the energy up to do it. Being able to send users to https://www.example.com/foo/your_data.csv and have that send the right headers for caching, refresh and authentication so they can use Excel as a mini BI front end without screwing around with ODBC or similar etc would be a nice way to answer the "integration" question for clients that are too small to have a IT department to help them with database connections, firewalls etc.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#49

Post by Wistar »

appwiz wrote: post #45

One of the best Excel tips video I’ve seen is by Joel Spolsky - aptly named “You suck at Excel”. I’ve been an Excel user forever and this video taught me about features that I never knew existed. Have a look: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c

Agreed. I learned, and re-learned a lot about Excel from that video.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#50

Post by davidwihl »

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…

I’ve seen Dan Bricklin in the local Whole Foods on several occasions. I want to yell out: “see that guy! He changed the world!” but then I let him pick an avocado in peace.
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