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Excel never dies (2021)

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81–90 of 275 posts

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#81

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…

I don’t know about GSheets, but Excel has dynamic arrays (of variable lengths) since at least two years ago. Or a couple of lines of VBA can accomplish the same.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#82
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.)

There are a few things reactive formulaic spreadsheets need to do before reaching peak. Normalization like concepts. Abstractions. It will come.

I'm unfortunately pessimistic. Not because they couldn't, but because in today's IT environment, "empowering the user" is perhaps the lowest priority.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#83
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.)

As a developer, when I worked in VBA it was just way more rewarding and appreciated. I was way happier with the work I was doing and having a much bigger (and more visible) impact... Sadly I got paid roughly 1/4 of what I get paid now to muck around in package.json files all day. I know it's not fashionable to say,but yeah I feel like Excel is underrated and scoffed at by the "serious tech" community when it should be lauded as an example to strive towards.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#84

Excel is great, but sometimes it can be abused. I have seen some horrendously complicated VBA sheets that are so much simpler to program in any procedural language. 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).

Can you expand on that? My view of VBAis that it is a dated, but pretty much standard procedural language.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a criticism of spreadsheets in general.

Does this criticism extend to graphing calculators?

No. Spreadsheets allow for easy manipulation of large tables of numbers and immediately see the results. It’s this ability to ‘tweak’ the numbers quickly that makes it so dangerous.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#86
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.)

> Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented 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…

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#87

Massive companies are run off dodgy Excel spreadsheets. I make my living from 3 completely different items of software (seating planner, task planner, data transformation). I'm sure Excel is the main competitor for all 3. The whole of western civilization might collapse if Excel were to suddenly disappear.

At least 50% of my day job could be described as "replace some guy's Excel file that got out of hand". I'm not even mad, I'll die before excel does.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#88

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…

Can you give a more detailed description of what you were trying? I can't know for sure, but it sounds like Excel can easily handle what you've described, if you use it right.

>the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance.

How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.

>(I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different).

It would have been very different, because Excel has tables and Powerquery and Google Sheets doesn't.

>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.

Were you using dynamic array formulae? They can handle the old problem of needing to fill down formulae to an arbitrary depth. Or again, tables.

Programmers routinely underestimate Excel. Unlike most Microsoft products, it has improved year on year over the past few decades. There are heaps of great power-user features they keep introducing. The skill ceiling is very high .. not as high as proper software engineering, but still damned high.

It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel in LibreOffice Calc" -- no you fucking well cannot. (And I use Linux on my personal computers full time).

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#89
"Excel" became a synonym for spreadsheets. There are millions of SMEs, today, running on spreadsheets that aren't Excel. My wife runs her little SME with her paid-for Google Workspace / G Suite: she and her employees are happily filling 'em little cells from the browser in their Google world (for better or worse). There are millions of SMEs like these.

I should know better and run some spreadsheet locally (or maybe use Emacs, which of course can do simple spreadsheet stuff) but I don't bother: I use Google spreadsheets for my VAT, tax, fuel/car mileage computation etc.

Many people around me do just that: they never used any advanced spreadsheet feature and Google spreadsheet is sufficient.

It's as if anyone using GMail who eventually discovered the "Google Drive" then realized he had "Excel" there too (it's Google spreadsheet but they don't care, they still call it Excel). How many people are using GMail?

I also know, shocker, one Apple afficionado using Apple numbers although the Apple users I know typically have GMail / Google spreadsheet.

Now here's the funny kicker: besides during that one gig in a 50 K employees boat, I don't know anyone still using Excel. And, oh the irony, at that gig I was tasked with porting a spreadsheet to a dedicated app.

Of all the Mac laptop users who don't bother having a desktop anymore... Certainly there are some (like my wife) who need a spreadsheet right? Are these people actually all buying Excel to run it on their Mac? Or are Mac users not spreadsheet users!?

I'm confused.

To me a more correct article title would be:

"Spreadsheet never dies" (and "Excel" became a synonym for "spreadsheet").

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#90
Excel runs the world. Every large company claiming to be ERP-native is telling lies. Shit gets done in Excel, and is then exported back into ERP, if at all.

Things you would consider quite irresponsible to be done in Excel, is done in Excel regardless. Indeed, that annual financial report of a Fortune 500 boils down to financialresults_v2_nowaitonemorechange_final_FINAL_withcomments_official.xlsx"

My g/f works for one of the leading ERP providers. I won't tell you which one but it starts with an S and ends with AP. They're dogfooding their own ERP but employees prefer Excel.

It's like gravity, just stop resisting.

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