101–110 of 185 posts
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In a past life, I made (very expensive) spreadsheets for a living. And though I don't like most Microsoft products, I'm pretty sure that Excel was built by God himself (or at least He was the lead dev or the PM).
I think the PM was Joel Spolsky.
dude, it's called first mover advantage
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The purpose of software isn't to be correct or even predictable . It's to satisfy the needs of the user. The user in this case, isn't you. It's corporate clients who make decisions for tens of thousands of employees. They have various needs, however esoteric and strange. I promise you that all of the behavior you cited was implemented at the request of a client. Ideally Microsoft should craft custom versions for spec…
I use Excel nearly every day at work. How am I not the user? My company has needs too, one of which is correctly editing spreadsheets and delimited files. Excel is insufficient for this.
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That's akin to saying "this screwdriver sucks as a hammer." You're using it wrong.
When you go to the hardware store and ask for something to pound nails, they give it to you. When you ask people what they use to pound nails, they say they use this. When you're hired to pound nails, they often insist that you pound nails with this. 99.9% of the people who use this on a regular basis use it exclusively to pound nails. Given that context, it makes little sense to say, that's unfair, it's really a scr…
Consensus =/= Fact in every scenario.
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Word certainly is, at least on OS X. Within an hour of my first time using it in a decade last week, I caused it to beachball for five minutes straight by clicking a single button (select all text of a given style). It then took me over an hour to figure out why my TOC entries had no spacing between their numbers and titles (hint: it wasn't the spacing setting), and another hour to figure out why, after I "fixed" the…
In defense of Word: The vast majority of people don't realize just how massive Word is in terms of it's feature set and it's complexity, Word is a fully furnished publishing program and most people treat it like a rich text editor. I still have and use it irregularly for a few things, but if you just need to edit text with formatting, use TextEdit. Using Word to type up a memo is like using a jet engine to cook a TV…
(It's actually used in many publishing workflows, but for the early stages, where all you want is a rich text editor with the ability to do diffs. Typography and layout is done later with different tools)
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> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and…
Absolutely; no one uses Office because they can "quickly pick up any of its applications". People use Office because they already "picked up" its applications. LibreOffice? Lemmee see here, I'm a bookkeeper/lab research assistant/factory supervisor that just wants to get my shit done and go home. There's this FOSS thing that mostly works but sometimes doesn't, or this Microsoft thing that I already know how to use an…
MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.
The shittiest aspect of Office is the price.
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It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that n…
Let's start a list: Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT. The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UD…
I have some scripts that generate CSV files with formulas and for the record they work fine in both Excel and LibreOffice Calc.