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'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

theguardian.com

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Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#111

Post by gosub100 »

lostlogin wrote: post #98
ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

I 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?

It's very uncommon to use them for any common expenses like groceries or gas. I use them for a quarterly HOA payment, yearly CPA tax preparation, petty government fines and fees, and donations to charity. Generally things that you mail a payment for and you want a record of the payment. Most of these I could do electronically but I don't really save any time doing so because of the friction of setting up the payment.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#112

Post by NBJack »

copperx wrote: post #75
xbmcuser wrote: post #41

This 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…

That's cool. I'm wondering if using an LLMs could make using Pandas or R as easy as Excel.

I doubt that. Pandas is stupidly powerful... for raw data, experiments, and ML model training/inference. But in my experience it rapidly becomes an esoteric box at times when you need to get data back out of it.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#113

Post by NBJack »

NeoTar wrote: post #11

Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme). I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, bu…

No joke, I built a Excel compiler once. All functions written became legit code you could compile down to a binary. But wow, I learned a lot about how complex that could get... my intermediate language was technically readable, but when every cell is a function, it got so big it would break the target binary compiler unless I split it up. Good times though....

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#114

Post by jimnotgym »

I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets.

Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad.

You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good.

The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over 'proper' software, databases etc is portability and auditability.

Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#115

Post by cmgbhm »

kjellsbells wrote: post #77

Reading these comments, I think I might be a dinosaur, but Excel (native, Windows) has a really good keybindings UI (you press Alt, and all the key choices light up), and the ability to record actions as macros and then inspect the code is absolutely gold for automation. I know VBA is profoundly uncool and all that, but boy, if there was a better native IDE inside Excel with Copilot helping me along, I would be throw…

There’s a lot of finish in the Microsoft products.

Views are so much faster to pick settings in Excel. You can format tables and indent them (nested ledger) You can get higher information density.

It’s always amazing to me to wade through “how to x” in Google and see 100s of people asking for years.

Google docs and numbered headings is one of those.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#116

Post by pxc »

An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She's a programmer, so she could have used a wide range of tools but Excel was what she reached for and it evidently did the trick nicely.

The thing that stands out to me in these stories is that spreadsheet programs are a (1) the most common site of programmability that features in anyone's lives, even non-programmer; and (2) for many tasks, spreadsheets sit at some kind of local optimum in a tradeoff between simplicity and power. (There's surely something for engineers and designers to learn from the second point.)

It seems like a connection worth celebrating, between people like us and the mostly non-programming public— a little piece of overlap between two worlds.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#117

Post by codethief »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

I 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…

> 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 interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.

Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#118

Post by pxc »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #94
ethbr1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent, but in my spreadsheets fonts map to certainty ranges. Serifs in increasing somberness for the most concrete numbers, sans for everyday estimates, and papyrus whenever I just toss random numbers in.

Could a human - in your scenario - differentiate the meaning between more than 8 fonts though?

When you've slowly built up a UI for your own purposes— whether the accretions are font faces or keybindings or context menu items— definitely! Picture a spreadsheet/convention that has evolved over the course of 6 years, seeing continuous use throughout that time.

As someone with color discrimination problems and contrast difficulties, I would so much prefer font/style coding over color coding. Sounds great!

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#119

Post by jayd16 »

codethief wrote: post #117
ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

I 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…

> 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 interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand. Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?

Presumably they're talking about paying down more of the principle sooner, lowering the interest amounts.

Re: 'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

#120

Post by zvr »

ethbr1 wrote: post #54
hotsauceror wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Not parent, but in my spreadsheets fonts map to certainty ranges. Serifs in increasing somberness for the most concrete numbers, sans for everyday estimates, and papyrus whenever I just toss random numbers in.

Now, this is extremely interesting!

I am not a fan of encoding information in the presentation layer and I would use an extra column to show the "certainty" explicitly, but using different fonts in addition is an excellent idea. Many thanks for this!

Even in this case, though, I doubt you would go over the threshold of 8 fonts that was mentioned.

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