The spreadsheet UI is the one interface design that will not disappear in millions of years. Hard to imagine any UI that’ll last longer. This is the very pinnacle
Excel never dies (2021)
31–40 of 275 posts
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#32Is it Excel that never dies, or is it the concept of spreadsheets in general?
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#33As 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.)
> ever invented
That would be visicalc then.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#34There are so many technologies Microsoft has tried to go all in on over the years...Internet Explorer, Edge, and .Net to name a few.
Why they've never gone all in on the idea of Excel as a fundamental part of the operating system on top of which more sophisticated apps operate baffles me.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
improv never caught up sadly.. but hey, it's reboot decade so time to dust it off in react
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#36As 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 an…
Avoiding any custom software development and purchasing is the number one priority for small to medium businesses that want to survive if you ask me. I've seen a couple of them killed by software. At this point I'd rather work for a company that is held together with Excel than "domain specific enterprise software" having worked in that sector for years.
Actually the most fun I ever had was being the "IT guy" as a secondary function in a small engineering business in 2001. That was amazing. I didn't have to do a lot and could concentrate on my primary role with enough distractions to make it and my secondary one interesting. We just ran a Windows 2000 domain with 9 workstations on a switch with a 512K ADSL router and it basically just worked flawlessly. Excel 2000 featured heavily.
I occasionally get the urge to build out a Windows 2000 and Office 2000 box just because it was the last windows release that I enjoyed.
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#37I 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…
You have to have a compelling reason for changing away from an excel spreadsheet from a users perspective.
If you give users their exact spreadsheet but in a web interface, you have probably given them zero benefit and removed all flexibility (i.e. what would have been a new column in three seconds is now a feature request to IT).
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#38As 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 an…
I share that thought which is one of the reasons I'm so excited about the platform I'm building. While I'm trying really hard to focus on being a "vertically integrated board game company", there is the siren song to go beyond board games and make a platform for business.
I wrote a programming language which is like a better structured Excel with a reactive database. It's super fun to play with at the moment, but it's immature: https://www.adama-platform.com/
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#39And, "white collar" created Excel!
Re: Excel never dies (2021)
#40"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.
Had to rebuild all of my dad’s Lotus 1-2-3 sheets in Excel to finally force the switch!