Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 91 posts

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#51

Post by texasbigdata »

amichal wrote: post #48
zokier wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe this exists. Under data, “get data”, then the url/http feature. You can also manually recursively limit a list of urls but by that point you’re privacy going beyond what the tool should be used for.

https://youtu.be/cLWCUgCYl5Y

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#52

Post by myself248 »

fortran77 wrote: post #44
dartharva wrote: post #28

I wish Excel used newer, easier programming languages like Python for scripting and macros. I don't like learning an entirely new programming language just to make use of one software feature.

Why Python? It's 2020. It should be Rust.

That's the thing, if they change it to the language du jour every jour, it wouldn't be a stable environment.

As it is right now, business logic implemented in Excel executes on a more stable platform than business logic implemented on Windows itself. A spreadsheet from the Windows 3 era will load and calculate without modification, a Win16 binary won't.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#53

Post by Jtsummers »

fortran77 wrote: post #44
dartharva wrote: post #28

I wish Excel used newer, easier programming languages like Python for scripting and macros. I don't like learning an entirely new programming language just to make use of one software feature.

Why Python? It's 2020. It should be Rust.

Given your handle I would've expected you to prefer Fortran.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#54

Post by gherkinnn »

I’m perpetually amazed and sometimes shocked at how much of our world relies on Excel.

Being central to developing Excel has to be the safest IT job out there. Half of the world can be on fire and you’re still required.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#56

Post by virgulino »

dartharva wrote: post #28

I wish Excel used newer, easier programming languages like Python for scripting and macros. I don't like learning an entirely new programming language just to make use of one software feature.

You can program MS Office in Python. And Lua, and Ruby, and Fortran, and others, and mix'em all in a single spreadsheet. That's the beauty of Active Scripting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Scripting

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#58

Post by rightbyte »

ndespres wrote: post #31
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…

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 punishmen…

Well I would give Excel some cred for acctually following local number conventions. It the beginning there was no internet and interoperability issue.

Usually it is the us-en way or the highway.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#59

Post by n4r9 »

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…

> Hopefully it won't take another 35 years for them to fix CSV opening so it doesn't auto-format long numbers into scientific notion or dates, then cause unrecoverable data loss when you save.

This has been a major issue when working with Australian address data, where the street number was quite often a range e.g. "1-12". Excel would auto-convert to "12-Jan" upon opening the file, and save it as that if you clicked save, and there was no workaround I could find. I eventually told the tester to use Libre Office Calc instead.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#60

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvoting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html As they say, it never does any good and makes boring reading. Moreover, users often give corrective upvotes, as they did above, which means that the complaint about downvoting is now factually false, and lingers on like uncollected garbage in a thread.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=...

The rest of your comment is just fine.

Post reply on HN