41–50 of 275 posts
As 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 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.
As 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.)
Is it Excel that never dies, or is it the concept of spreadsheets in general?
As 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
I've seen enough cases where the opposite is the case. Businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are often very inefficient, drowning in more problems than solutions and the day to day workflows for employees are awful. I'm not trying to say a small shop should go all in with Oracle or SAP, however a healthy investment in specialised software often pays off extremely well.
As 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 argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual human beings it affects.
It goes from “if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week to 50 hrs/week, we’ll make our deadline” all the way to “look, if we reduce the number or cancer treatments we authorize by X% then our profits go up by Y%”
I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. (I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different). For example, it is very non-intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all the rows in another sheet that match this rule, and once you do that, since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.
I realize most people don't have the luxury or skills, but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet.
After this experience, I can't help but wonder if Excel and spreadsheets largely exist due to pre-existing knowledge about how to use them, or if this is _actually_ the best way for non-programming minded people to solve these problems.