Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Excel never dies (2021)

notboring.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 275 posts

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#71

Post by apancik »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

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…

Excel has some functionality that Google Sheets are missing that is used in this particular use case. More specifically, it has a primitive called Table. After you set up your data as Tables, you can then reference whole columns as Table1[Column1] and it also fills your formulas down as you add more rows.

I don't want to defend Excel too much, as it is not ideal in many ways. Nevertheless, over time, I found myself using it more and more to prototype and visualize data. With magic features like Pivot charts, Flash fill, and Data tables you can hammer out a one-off "app" in a matter of minutes.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#72

Post by vic-traill »

jrm4 wrote: post #6

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.)

Obligatory BillyG Review story from Joel on Software:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

It provides a glimpse into the complexity and backwards compatibility (to Lotus 1-2-3 no less!) that I find interesting.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#74

Post by simonh »

eddieroger wrote: post #14
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are quite a few options, including emulators, clones and HC inspired projects.

https://hypercard.org/

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#75

Post by smt88 »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

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…

The problems you mentioned are solved by Excel using tables, which are named, variable in size, and can be referenced by column names instead of addresses.

Tables can also be joined and queried using Power Query.

Excel is still 100x more powerful and sophisticated than Sheets is.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#76

Post by adepressedthrow »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #55
adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

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…

Someone who has extensive experience in Excel but only basic knowledge in software development will quickly realize that they can develop something in Excel faster than they can build it in a CRUD app.

I certainly get that, but I'm primarily pointing out that as a non-layman from the software side, it doesn't seem like a particularly amazing tool. It certainly could be the case that it's extremely good for non-programmers, I was simply pointing out that I naively think it's not very well designed for those usecases.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#77

Post by PeterStuer »

jrm4 wrote: post #6

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've seen Excel trive in no places more so than those commited to the "one true ERP" religeon.

And it is not subversion. It is people trying to do their job despite draconian topdown unworcable policies and systems shoved down their thoat, keeping the operations side afloat in the face of debilitating managerial ignorance.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#79

Post by adepressedthrow »

apancik wrote: post #71
adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

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…

Excel has some functionality that Google Sheets are missing that is used in this particular use case. More specifically, it has a primitive called Table. After you set up your data as Tables, you can then reference whole columns as Table1[Column1] and it also fills your formulas down as you add more rows. I don't want to defend Excel too much, as it is not ideal in many ways. Nevertheless, over time, I found myself u…

Interesting. It definitely seems like that would fix a lot of my issues, which prompts the question of why Google hasn't built this functionality
Post reply on HN