I've always hated excel. I'd much rather use R or Python. My first job used an Excel macro to automate tasks in a DOS emulator for some legacy software. It would take days to complete and would regularly crash. As they say, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Excel never dies (2021)
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Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#12Bit of Excel humor seems appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY (Krazam)
Krazam is how my 3-minute bathroom break turns into an obscure comedy deep-dive
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#13I've always hated excel. I'd much rather use R or Python. My first job used an Excel macro to automate tasks in a DOS emulator for some legacy software. It would take days to complete and would regularly crash. As they say, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Give me a slow, brittle, complicated, poorly documented app written in X by a bunch of people who have long since left the company, and I'll show you a way to make a person hate X.
It doesn't matter what X is.
And it's a shame, because improving or replacing those legacy X's can be a big opportunity, if the person is set up to seize it in the right way.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#14As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
Hypercard. The difference, of course, is that Excel wasn't abandoned by its owners like Hypercard was.
Dammit I miss HyperCard. HyperCard got me in to programming by making it accessible to someone who didn't even realize they were doing it - my Hebrew teacher in third grade. There haven't been many tools that can make anything from a simple card file to Myst. I wish there was something like that today, or that I was a good enough engineer to contribute to a modern replacement.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#15As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
There are a few things reactive formulaic spreadsheets need to do before reaching peak. Normalization like concepts. Abstractions.
It will come.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#16" But there’s one software product born in 1985, before many of us were even a twinkle in our parents’ eye " ~ I feel personally attacked. /s
In 1985 I was the cause of sleep deprivation. Pretty much the opposite of a twinkle.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#17My brother teaches Decision Support Systems using Excel+VBA at the university because he found that students became productive fastest with it. Spreadsheet model introduced by VisiCalc is probably one of the greatest paradigms introduced in computing making certain programming scenarios extremely accessible. I wish we had more innovations on par with spreadsheets down the road but I don't think we did.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#18As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
It does the job and it enables "regular folks" to solve business problems. This creates value. Most business problems don't require sophisticated IT systems.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about a sophisticated solution involving commercial software packages, databases, webservers, cloud services etc. and then I remember "If I bend the problem just a little bit it fits into an Excel table with a bit of VBA glue and the problem is solved in a much less complicated way. Our scale is small so it will stay solved for years to come. My coworkers can handle and maintain the file so it doesn't fall back to me when problems arise. So yeah, stupid as it may sound, Excel is the best solution for this problem."
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#19I am currently writing Python with Pandas - reading in genormous XLS spreadsheets to wrangle them into yet another XLS spreadsheet which is then fed to a legacy system to read in.
Excel truely is the universal data programming tool.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#20As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
There are a few things reactive formulaic spreadsheets need to do before reaching peak. Normalization like concepts. Abstractions. It will come.
It already arrived in the form of Lotus Improv.