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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

#161

Post by chaps »

whall6 wrote: post #157
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…

This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures. If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it. One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you…

Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

oneplane wrote: post #154
lolinder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> This is an elitist software engineer's take. No it isn't. This is MY take and I'm not an elitist software engineer. > People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. No, it isn't. It is human behaviour alright, but it's cutting corners because it feels better to do what you already know instead of doing what was instructed. This is…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by ddingus »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #138
ddingus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great skill to have. When I set Win 11 or earlier version PCs for others, I always load up Void Tools "Everything" and then swing by FossHUB for the full set of tools. Libre Office, Inkscape, and many more all go on the machine. And then I explain what they just got and what it is worth. Almost everyone ends up being able to use the OSS tools. Doing this saves a ton of money!

Honestly for office just massgrave it The rest, yes I love OSS tools on Windows. But have fun when their important word docs get garbled (it's an example, do not come after me with some "uuuh acually word docs open fine now")

Yeah, it is not perfect.

Nothing is.

I find explaining a few good computing practices coupled with a tour of the many fine OSS tools available literally for the asking, does real good for anyone willing to invest a bit of their time.

MS Office itself can corrupt its own documents. Ask many of us how we know, right? Now that is more rare than it is for the OSS tools, but it does happen.

You are not wrong. I am not sure what being right actually means in this context too. So yeah. I will just move on.

The most important aspects of all this boil down to people being able to do stuff other people would prefer they not do.

Further, should they be inclined to do said stuff, actually seeing it happen, and or, getting help to make it happen usually solidifies how important "Use Value" really is.

Unlike physical goods, software has the unique property of it increasing in value both as a sum of parts AND as more copies of it are made and used!

Think about that for a moment.

Done?

Great! Fact is that use value dynamic runs counter to our general and natural inclinations. I really enjoy it when people begin to think this way, embrace the tools, understand the culture and share it themselves.

From there, if they can learn to first build and then write software, they will have near fully bootstrapped themselves onto the best open computing and open data have to offer and we all see a fractional value change for the better.

Yeah, probably more of a response than expected. I sure did not start out with all this in mind myself!

It has been a while since I felt the need to express these things in the hope passers-by get something out of it they can use.

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

#164

Post by ddingus »

SoftTalker wrote: post #152
ddingus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerPoint Paste with source formatting or theme, I can't recall the exact name right now, rules. It means being able to mooch slides from any file and use them with no real fuss. An alternative is to turn the slide into a bitmap.

I get that there are a few cases where it's useful. Make those require "ALT-SHIFT' or whatever. Make normal paste insert just the text.

Yep. I agree! Sorry, it just popped out.

Your primary point is solid. Seconded.

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

#165

Post by timomaxgalvin »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #147
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?

These are true, but it's not the reason it's so successful.

It's the original agile, functional programming environment. Code iteration and basic testing is done in microseconds.

I remember laughing very hard when someone excitedly told me about REPL in python, like it was a new idea.

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

#166

Post by nhatcher »

WillAdams wrote: post #143

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.

FWIW, I am building another alternative. We are very, very, very far away from Excel. But TBH I think that's true for anything else that is not Excel or Google sheets. Zoho deserves a special mention and lots of other good folks have created fantastic things like rows ir grid.is

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

#167

Post by rr808 »

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…

Its really disappointing that VBA stopped improving since 20 years ago. Imagine if you could embed C# or even better F# in workbooks, and also have a way to better way to package libraries. We wouldn't see Python notebooks.

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

#168

Post by Karellen »

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…

Excel spreadsheets are auditable?

If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them?

https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa...

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...

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

#169

Post by mrkstu »

lolinder wrote: post #159
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Excel in the exact same way with Microsoft 365.

Last time I had to use it, Microsoft 365's web version was missing a ton of functionality, even more than Google Sheets is. If I need Excel I need Excel, if I can make do with a web version then I'm not going to use Microsoft's.

It's been catching up over time, a couple more revisions and it'll be 99% of the way there, minus 3rd party plugins.

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

#170

Post by nradov »

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…

And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good enough" for basic, simple stuff but for anything more it's a real productivity killer.
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