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

“Balancing a checking account” in American vernacular is typically used to mean reconciling the transactions your bank has posted to the spend you’ve tracked.

This used to be more important when you wrote paper checks and received a monthly paper statement from your bank. Most people who “balance” their accounts today seem primarily concerned that they are adhering to their personal budget. But the term remains.

Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply being a piece of software means that they could adapt it to do all kinds of things that are better fulfilled by a different tool. Just because they adapted it to make it a database and a spreadsheet hybrid thing doesn't mean it was also the right thing to do. It was the thing to do that made them money and have them capture market share.

Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better.

So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes.

It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.

If any Excel alternative wants to make a dent in market share, they need an option for users to mimic all the main Excel shortcuts. Google Sheets is close so it's useable; however, trying to use something like Apple Numbers is like switching from querty to dvorak.

The European mind cannot comprehend how primitive American consumer banking is.

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small.

In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment.

The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone.

Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong)

But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences.

Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.

You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.