Excel never dies (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#111

Post by djbebs » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

djbebs wrote: post #108

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…

Well half that is already done(the output!)

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#112

Post by majewsky » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

> Most software we use at work exists in one of two categories:

> 1. It’s new and we love it for now.

> 2. It’s old but we have to use it and we hate it.

> [... Microsoft Excel] inhabits its own category: it’s old, but we love it

There's a fourth quadrant missing in that diagram: "It's new and we hate it", aka "the Microsoft Teams quadrant".

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#113

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

thrown_22 wrote: post #110

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.

I fail to compile 1 year old code if I don’t have the exact compiler and library versions that the program required at the time of development.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#114

Post by ab_testing » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

> 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. What would you use to build a CRUD app faster than an excel app

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#115

Post by thrown_22 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #113

thrown_22 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever) I regularly compile 35 year old C code. Standards are great like that.

I fail to compile 1 year old code if I don’t have the exact compiler and library versions that the program required at the time of development.

You should write better code.

Excel breaks between versions silently. One of my first jobs out of university was to build a pipeline of excel spreadsheet to ensure they were run in the version of excel and windows they were created in. You could not guarantee that you would get the same results otherwise. This was a slight problem for the brokerage I was working at since it had lost them a few million dollars recently.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#116

Post by jklinger410 » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

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.

Please bring back CTRL+SHIFT+V as paste values only

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#117

Post by aargh_aargh » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

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.

Bring back Access. I understand it needs to be rebuilt, so probably build it on top of sqlite. There's nothing (popular) in the niche left by Access.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#118

Post by ant6n » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #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 on…

Well, theres one issue: everybody hates SAP.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#119

Post by vsareto » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #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 on…

We have non-excel financial reports via a web app, but of course the actual software requirements were gathered in an excel file

It is not vastly easier to use than Excel, but certainly nice when there’s a web app to find instead of a loose file

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#120

Post by zerr » Thu, Aug 04, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

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.

Why there is no "Check spelling as you type" in Excel?