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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

#141

Post by CamelCaseName »

This is a very basic article compared to the conversation here.

Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis.

As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn't trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%.

I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is.

Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.

So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

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

#142

Post by heraldgeezer »

cendyne wrote: post #19

There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.

Still happens lol

Some companies dont want to learn a new tool

Or pay for a new tool like itglue/bitwarden/keeper

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

#143

Post by WillAdams »

It's unfortunate that folks haven't had the chance to try the various other alternatives --- Informix WingZ had quite nice charts, Lotus Improv was quite different, and only Quantrix has survived, but not many folks get to use it since its so expensive to license a seat. I wish the opensource Flexisheet would be reworked so that it would compile and run again.

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

#144

Post by elmerfud »

lolinder wrote: post #134
elmerfud wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. On the contrary, in many domains in life the right tool for the job is almost always going to be the one that everyone is already using. It's usually not the most satisfying tool or the most elegant, and its use will usually make perfectionists scream, but if you're actually interested in gettin…

I would disagree that in many domains that this makes this the right choice. The domain scope that it makes "already known" the default right choice is generally when you're choosing short-term cost optimization over all other options. This is what Excel has fallen into. It has not produced a better outcomes it has arguably produced worse outcomes. Because the idea of bloat is a real thing.

When your sole goal is short-term thinking, and I don't believe this is Microsoft's goal but this is the user's goal that they're catering to, you get tools like Excel. It feels like a cost reduction because you're not having to retrain people you're not having to hire people who are interested in learning and interested in finding out new things. Microsoft is happy to do it because when you hit the functional limits of that tool or you have devised something so idiotically complex in that tool that no one else can understand it and you've forgotten yourself how to understand it there's a whole suite of consultants ready to take your money. So your short-term cost optimization has resulted in a long-term expense.

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

#145

Post by andyferris »

Etheryte wrote: post #135
candiddevmike wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would temper your hot take. Nothing you described is a feature specific to Excel from what I can tell, and using Excel in front of an ERP is most likely an anti-pattern as the ERP is meant to handle reporting and authorization in a centralized way.

Nearly everyone who knows how to use a computer knows how to use Excel to some extent. That is a feature of Excel that pretty much no other software solution can bring to the table.

I would contend that any user that can use Excel could pick up e.g. Google sheets instantly, especially in an audit capability where you want to scan the data (and view a couple formulae) rather than craft it from scratch.

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

#146

Post by elmerfud »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #139
elmerfud wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take your Hammer example it really depends on what you're doing. If the only thing you're doing is pounding framing nails then one framing hammer is generally suitable. If you need to pound framing nails and you need to do metal work and you need to do fine finish work you will need a number of different hammers to accomplish those jobs and have a good outcome in each task. Your argument is that Excel is fine at b…

But what if you need to do all of those kinds of work every day, are not allowed to bring your own tools, and do not know which house you will be visiting each morning?

That seems like a statement of someone who's never done any of this kind of work at any kind of reasonable complexity level that would necessitate having good tools. That would be like you asking a contractor to come to your house but not tell them what you're looking to have done. The real problem there is they don't know what you're looking to do you might not even hire the right contractor so worrying about the tools is secondary.

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

#147

Post by nuancebydefault »

jimnotgym wrote: post #114

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 f…

The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming.

If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?

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

#148

Post by lolinder »

oneplane wrote: post #130
jimnotgym wrote: post #114

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 f…

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 wher…

> 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). ... 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.

This is an elitist software engineer's take.

People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. It's people using general-purpose computers as general-purpose computers. It's the closest to the personal computing dream that we've come, and likely the closest we ever will.

The alternative in the real world isn't "everyone learns Python", it's "we lock normal business people out of computing and keep it in the hands of the trained and very expensive software engineers". That's not going to happen, and it's frankly not something we should want to happen.

I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable. We miss the decades that the company ran very successfully without any software engineers on the payroll and see the giant spaghetti mess that made them finally decide it was worth the cost. But it's important to remember that these same businesses reached the point where they could afford to pay us to build something custom by building a successful business on top of Excel.

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

#149

Post by kbelder »

fifilura wrote: post #45
MostlyStable wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The finance department in a previous job rather undramatically moved over to Google Sheets from Excel after seeing the befits of the collaboration/online environment. They got some help by me for moving out the heavy stuff to SQL/BigQuery but that was also for the better. BigQuery and Sheets integrate very well these days so they could even use a Google sheet as a UI for the queries. Rows and columns, much better tha…

I think Google Sheets is nearly miraculous, with all that it can do as a web app, but it's amazing to me that anybody actually seriously using Excel in a professional capacity could migrate to it. They're not in the same weight class.

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

#150

Post by owenmarshall »

thibautg wrote: post #136
baq wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally things that you mail a payment for I’m sorry but this sentence makes absolutely zero sense to my europoor brain. What do you mean when you say mail a payment and why would you need to do that. I literally lack the imagination.

I don't understand either, but I would be genuinely interested in what "mailing a payment" means in practice. Is it like sending a check by mail or some kind of paper bank transfer?

Sending a check via mail is infrequently done, but it happens. I just paid my annual property taxes that way. My options were:

* mailing a check

* paying via credit card over the phone for a hefty surcharge

* cash in person

In my case, I used my online banking to send the amount to the mailing address on the bill. In some cases - for large companies, typically - my bank can send the remittance electronically. In others, though, they fill out a paper check on my behalf and send it via the postal system. This service is fee free to me, or else I’d have sent the letter myself.

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