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Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

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Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#71

Post by Someone1234 »

kyriakos wrote: post #68
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…

Add Outlook to the list and it sums up all the useful Office applications in 2020.

Respectfully disagree. Desktop Outlook is largely abandon-ware at this point, with no real development or improvements taking place for over ten years and Microsoft's efforts being almost exclusively focused on their online/webmail offers (e.g. Outlook.com/Office 365).

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#72

Post by agumonkey »

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 think you're about to reach the point where you realize that the world optimum point is very low.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#73

Post by nojito »

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

Connect to the CSV using Powerquery in Excel. Solves 100% of the problems of CSVs.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#74

Post by agumonkey »

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…

the infamous talk.. what a special spot on the timeline of mainstream tech

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#75

Post by kfk »

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…

Market growth that typically has high error margins precise to the decimal... I am with you and I would not give too much credit to Excel in 2020 and I used to work in finance. I think what people don’t realize is that code forces you to focus on the model and less on the “form”. Numbers should be numbers, not forced into telling a specific story, this type of work is for text, power point, and similar.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#76

Post by ludditeparttime »

Someone1234 wrote: post #71
kyriakos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add Outlook to the list and it sums up all the useful Office applications in 2020.

Respectfully disagree. Desktop Outlook is largely abandon-ware at this point, with no real development or improvements taking place for over ten years and Microsoft's efforts being almost exclusively focused on their online/webmail offers (e.g. Outlook.com/Office 365).

> no real development or improvements taking place for over ten years

You write this like it is a bad? Outlook does what it needs to do, send and receive email. I personally am glad that the changes which affect me have been minor. Email is a solved problem, no need for change for change sake.

Have you used Outlook365 on Desktop recently?

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#77

Post by ricohboy »

kyriakos wrote: post #68
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…

Add Outlook to the list and it sums up all the useful Office applications in 2020.

Second the disagree. As someone who supports users on Outlook on a daily basis, my anecdata is that it’s a buggy, abused, flaming dumpster fire

Perhaps it’s users who misuse it (think document management with 100gb+ inboxes) but a lot of times the solution for Outlook issues is to reinstall the whole Office suite since it’s just kinda one package now

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#78

Post by ricohboy »

ludditeparttime wrote: post #76
Someone1234 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully disagree. Desktop Outlook is largely abandon-ware at this point, with no real development or improvements taking place for over ten years and Microsoft's efforts being almost exclusively focused on their online/webmail offers (e.g. Outlook.com/Office 365).

> no real development or improvements taking place for over ten years You write this like it is a bad? Outlook does what it needs to do, send and receive email. I personally am glad that the changes which affect me have been minor. Email is a solved problem, no need for change for change sake. Have you used Outlook365 on Desktop recently?

They change and break Outlook regularly, and the only communication channel is a random Microsoft employee on a support forum

I wish they would leave it alone but they are changing things for change’s sake

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#79

Post by amichal »

cosmie wrote: post #70
amichal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excel has an entire ETL engine called PowerQuery tucked up under the hood. Originally part of SQL Server Analysis Services, it got strapped into Excel about a decade ago, and more recently tons of other products[1]. The Web[2] connector is what you're after. It can consume a variety of formats, including csv, xml, and json. It supports HTTP Basic Auth pretty well, but if you want to put the data source behind oauth i…

Thank you for this!. It's why i continue to read HN.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#80

Post by contradictioned »

Nullabillity wrote: post #39
contradictioned wrote: post #7

Excel is the "database scripting language" as I like to call it. Very flexible, just do what you want and see a quick result.

Surely that would be.. SQL?

SQL is then the programming language. I am aware that this differentiation is outdated; but if one sees a scripting language as something to write a small, self-contained job and a programming language something bigger more thought through and interoperable, (and with a fair bit of hand waving), I think that analogy fits.

Of course here we do not only have a program but tabular data and operations on them.

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