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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#151

Post by taviso »

_dain_ wrote: post #88
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…

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…

> 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).

It seems like your argument is that alternatives don't have PowerQuery. That might be true (I don't even know what it is), but isn't that like saying Linux can't compete with Windows, because it doesn't have Internet Explorer? I mean, it doesn't, but there are excellent alternatives that can accomplish exactly the same task.

Unless you can come up with an example task that can't be completed, then it seems like it's just a matter of opinion which is the better solution.

As far as I know both Google Sheets and LibreOffice have SQL and Pivot Tables, and -- believe it or not -- Lotus 1-2-3 had "/Data queries" in 1989. Naturally, the queries possible in 1-2-3 were limited, but you really could query large tables for things like "[Date] <= #date(2017,6,1)", which is the first result I got from typing "Power Query example statement" into Google.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#152

Post by collegeburner »

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…

as somebody who is very experienced with both writing crud apps and excel there's still a lot of cases where excel wins. a big one for me is making m&a models, stuff like that, excel is better bc you can organize view and move around data, re run calculations, whatever else in a tighter loop. and it's better at taking data in kinda inconsistent formats. there's a reason it is still king of IB, PE, all the finance world.

this is because excel was "low/no code" before it was a tech meme with vc money.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#153

Post by collegeburner »

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…

fr lol everybody who's worked in IB knows this. you go look in a VDR and it's like 99% excel files and PDFs. although for smaller businesses it's usually a quickbooks export or whatever, but whenever people need to actually get shit done or do something SAP or Oracle or whatever doesn't do right or takes too long.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#154

Post by collegeburner »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #140
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.

Ok, besides python support... The thing I'd like more than anything: A better way to edit cell with really long function calls. If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the top and not just in the cell. Like, sometimes you just need some if/else statements... but try to parse and edit even something fairly simple like: =IF(AND(LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression 5,Other_longexpression Even with…

+1 for python support. getting vba versions right for stuff that expects to interface through it can be a bitch if some vendor doesn't update stuff. you pay some stupid amount for a financial data product then it's like "lol this doesn't work with your version of office install 2016". not really excel dev's but python would be nice.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#155

Post by alach11 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #116
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

The solution for this (in most MS Office products) is CTRL+V then CTRL then T. Annoying, I know.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#156

Post by [deleted] »

_dain_ wrote: post #107
dima_vm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#157

Post by phpisthebest »

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…

Never, I will never stop resisting excel.

I wonder how many of these same companies end up with massive errors in their excel docs because of lack of formula control, input validation, and a whole host of other controls that ERP's are designed to prevent, that excel will happily do

Honestly I think that is why user want Excel, properly written software prevents the user from doing stupid things, excel does not

Human Error is rampant in Excel Docs, I remember a few years ago we had a project to convert some excel docs people were using into a web app, the number of mathematical errors, and invalid controls we found was unreal

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#158

Post by bhewes »

rr888 wrote: post #122
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.

Wow great, I used to customize Excel a lot for financial companies. VBA was good enough until about 20 years ago. VSTO was never as good because you need admin rights to install it. ExcelDNA was much better. I gave up 10 years ago so dont know what is going on now tbh. Right now I use Python and Pandas, mostly doing the same stuff but with more rows and a worse experience. If you could find an easy way to combine Pyt…

We use Xlwings. Xlwings pro allows for embedded python. We use xltrails to version control our excel files with embedded python and/or VBA.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#159

Post by LasEspuelas »

adepressedthrow wrote: post #142
_dain_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your aside is exactly why I wanted to use a spreadsheet. It's the only tool that has that market penetration for non-programmers, and I wanted to see what made it tick. It seems like that may have backfired by not using Excel, however.

I would love to understand more what limitations you faced with GSheets that are non-existent in Excel. I used to think the same but then I built some pretty complex computations in GSheets that I could not easily replicate in Excel. And U have built some complex stuff in both.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#160

Post by ies7 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #116
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

I still use the old excel way: Alt+E, A, V
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