I worked at several companies where the main competition is Excel and competing against it sucks because you have to change how people work to get them to use their product and people don't like that. They come up with "deal breakers" about why the software won't work for them and then imply that if you fix those things, they will adopt it. This is always false. I'm hoping my next job has another company as its main competitor instead.
Excel never dies (2021)
21–30 of 275 posts
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#22As 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.)
I would agree. I'm an Apple Numbers user now but I have yet to find something even remotely as useful as the spreadsheet abstraction. I use them for everything from solving engineering problems, forecasting, statistics, decision analysis to personal finance and project planning. I could solve all of the problems with a programming language but it'd take 10x as long.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#23"Microsoft launched Excel in 1985 exclusively on the Macintosh. It was that counterintuitive decision to launch on its competitor’s computer while Lotus 1-2-3 was stuck on its own MS-DOS" - crazy that microsoft recognised its own deficiency (difficult UI) and took a big bet with their competitor. Microsoft and Apple's relationship has been complicated from the start
My dad, a retired accountant, still refuses to switch from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel.
Wow. Legendary dude.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#24Every non-trivial enterprise software project eventually need to add support for upload and download of Excel files.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#25"Microsoft launched Excel in 1985 exclusively on the Macintosh. It was that counterintuitive decision to launch on its competitor’s computer while Lotus 1-2-3 was stuck on its own MS-DOS" - crazy that microsoft recognised its own deficiency (difficult UI) and took a big bet with their competitor. Microsoft and Apple's relationship has been complicated from the start
My dad, a retired accountant, still refuses to switch from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel.
Tell him about my Linux port, I'm updating it regularly and fixing bugs :)
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#26"Microsoft launched Excel in 1985 exclusively on the Macintosh. It was that counterintuitive decision to launch on its competitor’s computer while Lotus 1-2-3 was stuck on its own MS-DOS" - crazy that microsoft recognised its own deficiency (difficult UI) and took a big bet with their competitor. Microsoft and Apple's relationship has been complicated from the start
My dad, a retired accountant, still refuses to switch from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel.
My dad did that too for awhile but eventually gave in.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#27Excel is transformational. If you're reading this indoors, there's a good chance that significant portions of the building around you were engineered using excel.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#28I wrote a piece of code that was front-ended by Excel 3, in 1991 that talked to multiple, heterogeneous databases. There was some UUCP action, some FTP, DB2 on AS/400, some AT&T Unix, Wang, OS/2, and so on. It showed inventory and sales charts on a projector for executives. That thing ran till 2019 because the company called me and wanted to know how it worked. They were planning to replace it but could not figure it out.
Excel never dies. (My first spreadsheet was SuperCalc. It was amazing, for that time, but no one seems to be talking about their SuperCalc sheets any more.)
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#29Somewhat tangential, but for unusual uses of Excel I like this video where Michael Shackleford derives blackjack basic strategy from scratch using Excel in about half an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCF-Btu5ZCk
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#30[deleted]