61–70 of 275 posts
If you want to create or read Excel spreadsheets programmatically, I recommend LibXL, a simple and powerful C++ library. https://www.libxl.com/
(I am a customer, am not associated with them).
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Specialized software is a market for lemons. Most businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are ill-equipped to judge the vendors in question, and more often than not the net result is worse than the Excel mess.
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.
2. Excel sells for a good amount of money and they wouldn't want to cut that off.
I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…
My point being, don't judge spreadsheets by Google Sheets. Actually use Excel and you'll see a much more capable system and get a better understanding of why people (particularly non-programmers in business settings) stick with it.
EDIT: Pivot tables are in Google Sheets, so either I missed them before or they were added after I last gave it a serious look. My google-fu is not discovering the date they were added.
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.)
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.)