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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#231

Post by geysersam »

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…

Seriously doubt Google Sheets lacks powerful features that Excel has (except niche features). Why would the developers intentionally cripple their product? It's not like any common operations on table data is too challenging for the Sheets team to implement. If there's any real difference between the softwares it's in their respective focus.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#232

Post by dijit »

geysersam wrote: post #231
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…

Seriously doubt Google Sheets lacks powerful features that Excel has (except niche features). Why would the developers intentionally cripple their product? It's not like any common operations on table data is too challenging for the Sheets team to implement. If there's any real difference between the softwares it's in their respective focus.

I really despise Microsoft (from an irrational place) and even I have to agree that Sheets is relatively crippled.

Even basic chart types are not supported, I think it might be due to limits of what's possible in the browser.

Granted though, excel can't backed on bigquery.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#233

Post by actionfromafar »

geysersam wrote: post #231
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…

Seriously doubt Google Sheets lacks powerful features that Excel has (except niche features). Why would the developers intentionally cripple their product? It's not like any common operations on table data is too challenging for the Sheets team to implement. If there's any real difference between the softwares it's in their respective focus.

Not intentionally cripple. It takes years to get to feature parity even with laser focus. If that focus isn't there (deciding Sheets has a slightly different positioning in the market for instance) it's not getting to feature parity.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#234

Post by MikusR »

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.

Can you keep the upcoming UI butchering as opt in for at least 20 years?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#235

Post by deknos »

briandear wrote: post #204
taviso wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, beca…

Do Sheets and LibreOffice have Solver? No. They don’t.

LibreOffice does have an solver. but i have no idea how it compares to others.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#236

Post by otikik »

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

This is true, but you can improve things significantly by using named ranges.

Using `$PAYMENTS` instead of `Sheet2!$B2:$B$21` for your column data and `$TAX_RATE` instead of `$Sheet4!$A$1` clarifies things quite a lot.

You still will need to know how your data is structured (e.g. this is a column that goes down, this is a fixed variable) but it is way more readable.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#237

Post by Swenrekcah »

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…

Great suggestion, but don’t do it Microsoft. This is one of my signals for when to move on to another tool so if you implement this I’d stay in Excel longer!

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#238

Post by miniBill »

geysersam wrote: post #231
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…

Seriously doubt Google Sheets lacks powerful features that Excel has (except niche features). Why would the developers intentionally cripple their product? It's not like any common operations on table data is too challenging for the Sheets team to implement. If there's any real difference between the softwares it's in their respective focus.

Google Sheets is nowhere close to Excel in terms of features, and not just niche ones. The biggest being tables, IMO.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#239

Post by inglor »

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…

> If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the top and not just in the cell.

This seems like a simple enough suggestion - I will pass on the rest but let me see if this is something we can fit to the next FHL.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#240

Post by notaclevername »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #9
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.)

Hypercard. The difference, of course, is that Excel wasn't abandoned by its owners like Hypercard was.

Check out Power Apps. It is functionally Hypercard on top of any Office 365 data sources you want.
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