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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#101

Post by cosmodisk »

lazide wrote: post #97
cosmodisk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an average business with no internal expertise to evaluate vendors: well of course everyone's going to spin you whilst the money keeps flying out of your pockets. Smarter companies would at least hire people that could advise on such things.

If you had the organizational expertise to hire such a person, and the leadership to prioritize it enough to happen - you already would probably not need them that much.

People like that get hired through recommendations. I interacted with some companies where nobody would know shit about anything tech related but the senior managers were fairly well connected in the business world, so getting someone impartial who could advise on how to proceed wasn't too bad.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#102

Post by lolive »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

I really wonder what Excel developpers think of connecting spreadsheets and master data management services so you can link data between a spreadsheet and the master data. [wasn’t it the goal of OData?]

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#103

Post by hef19898 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #100
hef19898 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. Often with disasterous results, results that nobody really sees because it is just the status quo. Nothing wrong to use Excel for reporting and number crunching, ERP systems are not designed to do that. I hate it when people take short cuts and corners because they refuse to accept that an ERP is th…

> From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. From experience, most Excel solutions are because people get rebuffed (or have learned by experience that they will expend lots of effort and the be rebuffed or given something not fit for purpose) by the bureaucratic processes necessary to get anything provided to them by their enterprise systems…

As part of that priesthood, Excel is neither SOX nor otherwise compliant. If users get rebuffed, that is the overall system working as intended.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#104

Post by dima_vm »

Jtsummers wrote: post #68
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…

Google Sheets is pretty basic compared to Excel in terms of the kinds of data analysis and queries it permits (without dropping into another language). Excel added tables over a decade ago that allow for some very useful and much cleaner query and data analysis stuffs in straight Excel. Then there are power queries and pivot tables, not sure how long those two have been around but last I used Google Sheets it had not…

Not sure what you mean by "power queries", but Google Sheets support SQL queries.

Would be easier to see on an example.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#105

Post by rad_gruchalski »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

Lambdas are awesome but the ui and their management could use some work.

It would be great to have a “script” view to manage defined names instead of hacking them one by one.

Single line entry isn’t efficient and the default assumption that cursor keys navigate a sheet instead of the formula box, is annoying. I find myself copying formulas out of excel, modifying them in a text editor, and pasting them back.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#106

Post by whatever1 »

I can open a 20 year old excel file on a random pc and it will run perfectly.

I will be able to reproduce results and inspect the exact equations generating these.

Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever)

As a fresh grad I used to hate excel, but now I can totally see why it will never die.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#107

Post by _dain_ »

dima_vm wrote: post #104
Jtsummers wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Sheets is pretty basic compared to Excel in terms of the kinds of data analysis and queries it permits (without dropping into another language). Excel added tables over a decade ago that allow for some very useful and much cleaner query and data analysis stuffs in straight Excel. Then there are power queries and pivot tables, not sure how long those two have been around but last I used Google Sheets it had not…

Not sure what you mean by "power queries", but Google Sheets support SQL queries. Would be easier to see on an example.

PowerQuery. It's a tool built into Excel. It's a GUI that wraps an almost purely-functional DSL designed for ETL and data munging, called the M language. You can either use the GUI or write the code directly. It has first class functions and closures and normies are programming in it. It's great. More people should know about it.

Btw it's kind of funny seeing so many HN users, many of whom must be working on software that competes with Excel either directly or indirectly, who are so unknowing of the full capabilities of Excel, capabilities that are the bread and butter of any e.g. financial analyst, or logistics manager, or any smart non-programmer white collar worker. Maybe this "hacker repulsion field" is the secret of its dominance -- you can't compete with it if you never learn what it can do.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#108

Post by djbebs »

inglor wrote: post #94

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

Wait really?

Well if thats the case, making VLookups be able to use any column as an input or output, rather than being limited to having the input on the left and the output on the right.

Ideally I'd be able to have 2 additional parameters, one that would indicate the column where the input value is to be found, and another that would indicated the column from which the output value would come from.

I know there are some work arounds, but this would really simplify my life!

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#109

Post by GuB-42 »

madrox wrote: post #34

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.

It is a smart decision and a point where many companies fail.

Excel works perfectly as it is, it is a product that sells well, there is no reason to change it. They modernize it from time to time, but they follow what may be the most important thing in production: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Internet Explorer? It was already broken to begin with. Edge? No one wants it. .Net? Made to compete against Java, now facing competition from browser engines. These products have room for improvement, they need to be worked on. Excel just needs to keep being Excel.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#110

Post by thrown_22 »

whatever1 wrote: post #106

I can open a 20 year old excel file on a random pc and it will run perfectly. I will be able to reproduce results and inspect the exact equations generating these. Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever) As a fresh grad I used to hate excel, but now I can totally see why it will never die.

>Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever)

I regularly compile 35 year old C code.

Standards are great like that.

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