The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked!
https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe
Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!
'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
101–110 of 377 posts
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date. I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts. You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel. What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?
> don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces" every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same. so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each…
> so, what you are calling “fonts” (Arial, Times) are actually called “typefaces”
Excel (and standard Windows and Office – the two are still slightly different, I think – selector controls call typefaces “Fonts” in the selector control. That doesn’t mean it is using “Fonts” the same way in the error message, but…)
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#103I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better. One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the in…
What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.
Robust macro capability (VBA>AppScript), more advanced data analysis/validation and charting, easy integration with SQL/PBI, a mature add-in market.
And less tangible: it just feels much faster. I don't have any data for this last claim, it's purely based on personal experience. Although, when I use web Excel, this edge goes away.
And I don't use local files at all with Excel. Everything is either in OneDrive or SharePoint, accessible through web or app on whatever platform.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.
I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.
I've used both for a long time (relatively so for Sheets given its age). The online aspect aside, Sheets does tend to work for 90% of my use cases. But that last 10%? It doesn't come close to what I can accomplish with Excel. Exotic dimensions in data, frankly better pivot table support, and perhaps most maddening, the much faster macros....
I created a simple function/macro once in Sheets to help me indicate when a group of rows were done; I had to watch my 3-5k sheet painfully iterate through every line and assign new colors. The script system even gave up at some point after I closed my laptop(? So much for online!..), and I had to manually restart it.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#105I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better. One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the in…
> I balance my checking account Assuming that this relates to checks/cheques, are they going away in the US?
Many of us still write them semi-regularly although many are "written" by the bank. I admit that I keep my eye on my banking account online but otherwise don't pay a lot of attention day to day. Far larger amounts of cash are flowing through my credit cards than any individual direct payments.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#106I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files. Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (althou…
You should check out Row Zero ( https://rowzero.io ). We launched on HN earlier this year. Our CSV handling is the best on the market. You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.
or skip the spreadsheet and go relational with DuckDB. Pretty cool to run directly against a set of CSVs and get performant, results in a language most of us already know and use regularly.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one. Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation? I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.
To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.
I’ve wondered about it for years; why is the ‘paste’ command not ‘paste without style’ by default? A system level option to change this would be a vast improvement.
I’ve seen all sorts of gross workarounds. The URL bar is my go to these days, mainly because that works on mobile.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate it so much... some programs are even worse, they don't take ctrl shift v to get rid of the garbage. I've made it a habit to first paste stuff in a text editor, copy it again, and then paste it into programs like outlook so the formatting won't be all messed up... Still don't know of a single case where the "feature" was useful.
Fortunately Teams takes ctrl shift v, and it also leaves links untouched. Unfortunately it's rather easy to mistype it as ctrl shift c, which --as you might have guessed-- is "call everyone".
Amazing.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces" every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same. so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each…
you can be very pedantic about it, but Excel has no problem with 8+ variations of font size, color, and formatting, and everyone outside of typeface designers and newspaper men references typefaces as "the font".
Excel also has no problem with more than a dozen typefaces, with one size/style of each (I just tested it.)
The error message is probably using “fonts” in the technically correct sense for combinations of typeface, size, and style, while the user experiencing the error is probably confused and reporting that they are only using 8 “fonts” using the term to mean typefaces (which is how Excel itself uses the term in the UI, with the typeface selector using the label “Fonts”.) But if you are using 8 typefaces, using multiple sizes and styles of each, you can easily be using over 100 actual fonts.
Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel
#110This is one of the things LLM's have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done. I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spread…
Good old LibreOffice. I too fall back on that when Sheets fails me. It takes effort to justify Excel (or even Office) licenses in my workplace, but LibreOffice is available and approved for use. I won't say the 90s era interface impresses me, but it has become a shockingly solid product.