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Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

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Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#81

Post by cosmie »

amichal wrote: post #79
cosmie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My pleasure! Feel free to reach out, you have any questions (email in profile).

I'm not an expert on it, but I am a technical person currently working on the business side of the IT fence. And I frequently do (data-engineering heavy) consulting for clients who are similarly on the business side of IT. So none of the nifty ETL tools, data storage capabilities, or computing environments I have available when I'm on the IT side.

Power Query is a godsend in that scenario. It's a well featured ETL engine with integrations for a variety of systems, services, and databases (including generic JDBC/ODBC support). And has the ability to use direct HTTP calls when that's more appropriate/useful.

It also stores the data internally in a highly-compressed and optimized columnar store, independent of the "Excel data" on sheets. Which you can then either sync to a worksheet, or leave it in a state where the raw data isn't visible but can be accessed through a pivot table connected to it. So you can abuse it for far heavier work than you'd expect to be able to do in Excel.

And it's already there, sitting on virtually every business person's computer everywhere. Completely sidesteps the security, IT, procurement, and legal hassles you have to jump through to get a proper system. Not to mention user training - you can architect things in a way where all users have to do is maybe tweak a cell or two, then hit the Refresh button that's in the Ribbon. So the complexity of "learning something new" is completely absorbed on your side, and you're free of pesky support questions and hassles since you isolated them from being the new stuff (also making it harder for "accidental/I didn't press anything!" changes from users).

It's not perfect by any means and has a number of warts, usually falling short of more purpose-built solutions when those are options. But it's still pretty solid, and on balance has saved me far more frustration than it's caused. And without having to dip into the dreaded world of macros and VBA.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#82

Post by jankiehodgpodge »

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).

Not that I use it but Outlook in Office 365 is radically different. Has full integration with M365 groups etc.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#83

Post by mattalbie »

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

That video is required viewing for my team.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#84

Post by npunt »

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…

> 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.

As someone who's both worked in education and is a designer for a living, I've seen this argument a thousand times about a thousand things, and while there's sometimes merit in it, it's usually a cop-out.

Why not bake some of the education into the product, rather than treat them as separate? You probably can't have finance 101 in there, but excel is an example of a product whose internal documentation is rarely sufficient to answer even basic questions. Most of it is also at the basic level of what some function is, rather than how to solve higher level problems or why you'd choose one approach over the other.

This approach isn't unique either, there's lots of education technology exploring the overlap between learning and doing within a single tool. The reason we don't see this more is it involves a different team composition than traditional software teams, which tend to not even consider documentation a central part of the product experience, let alone teaching.

I agree with any tool capable of doing complex enough things, there's a discipline and an art to its use. But to say Excel doesn't really have a place to improve here is false, it's just stuck in its ways like lots of mature software is.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#85

Post by s1mon »

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

Came here to post essentially the same thing. Considering how much of most people's Excel usage (in my work experience) is basically making very simple tables/databases, the stuff in here should be required.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#87

Post by mmphosis »

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…

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Early_history

I remember there being dozens of different spreadsheet programs in the 1980's. Flash forward to 2020, and there is primarily Microsoft Excel, it's imitation LibreOffice Calc, Apple Numbers, and Google Sheets.

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#88

Post by kalleboo »

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…

It also has really broken handling of text encodings.

I've taken to importing CSV files using Apple Numbers, and saving as Excel

(i use Numbers primarily, Excel is just when I need to be interoperable with someone else)

Re: Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday

#90

Post by pillefitz »

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.

Learning VBA will take you 2hrs or so, and it's amazingly performant!
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