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Excel never dies (2021)

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Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#181

Post by hermitcrab »

_dain_ wrote: post #107
dima_vm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by "power queries", but Google Sheets support SQL queries. Would be easier to see on an example.

PowerQuery. It's a tool built into Excel. It's a GUI that wraps an almost purely-functional DSL designed for ETL and data munging, called the M language. You can either use the GUI or write the code directly. It has first class functions and closures and normies are programming in it. It's great. More people should know about it. Btw it's kind of funny seeing so many HN users, many of whom must be working on software…

PowerQuery is powerful, but also compromised by the fact it is so closely tied to Excel. If you want to do data transformation tasks (such as joins) on your Excel data and you don't want to learn R or Python+Pandas then you might be better off doing it in a no-code tool designed explicitly for the task, for example Alteryx (if you have deep pockets) or Easy Data Transform (if you don't).

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#182

Post by hermitcrab »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #179
qsort wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least 50% of my day job could be described as "replace some guy's Excel file that got out of hand". I'm not even mad, I'll die before excel does.

I'm curious, how do you find a job like that? It sounds kinda fun with clear requirements.

Isn't 50% of IT replacing creaky, lashed-together spreadsheets with code?

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#184

Post by trelane »

henning wrote: post #56
Closi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to have a compelling reason for changing away from an excel spreadsheet from a users perspective. If you give users their exact spreadsheet but in a web interface, you have probably given them zero benefit and removed all flexibility (i.e. what would have been a new column in three seconds is now a feature request to IT).

Yes, I've sat through all the meetings and customer calls where we talk about uncovering pain, addressing pain to deliver value. The customers are thrilled. Everyone is high-fiving. Then they go live and no one uses the service. Then it turns out there are "deal breakers" that mean they can't use the app. It's the same story over and over.

Also, nobody got fired for buying IBM. Or Microsoft, these days.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#185

Post by crazygringo »

markmark wrote: post #150
TacticalCoder wrote: post #89

"Excel" became a synonym for spreadsheets. There are millions of SMEs, today, running on spreadsheets that aren't Excel. My wife runs her little SME with her paid-for Google Workspace / G Suite: she and her employees are happily filling 'em little cells from the browser in their Google world (for better or worse). There are millions of SMEs like these. I should know better and run some spreadsheet locally (or maybe u…

> I don't know anyone still using Excel. I suspect that is very much just the crowds you move in. Every vaguely large enterprise I know is still 100% Microsoft. A huge part of Microsoft's profit these days is their Cloud department, which is really just printing money selling Office 365 licenses to enterprise.

Their comment said it -- SME's (small- and medium-sized enterprises).

There's a gigantic cultural division between SME's where the decision to go Google is a no-brainer (whether starting from in the first place, or switching to at some point in the past 10 years), and large enterprises where the inertia of MS Office is just too great to switch.

What's funny is just how deeply unaware both sides often are of the other -- as both of your comments demonstrate. :)

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#186

Post by themadturk »

potatoicecoffee wrote: post #161
adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

Have you heard of microsoft Access?

This stings. I work as one of the less-technical people in group of developers and maintain a fairly extensive flat-file database in Excel. I wanted to re-implement it in Access, but my boss said "No," because he was afraid if I left he wouldn't be able to find anyone to maintain it.

Also, Access isn't available with all Microsoft Office licenses. Excel is.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#187

Post by anothernewdude »

If important data for a business is in Excel, that company has a data problem.

There's no playback to previous states, there's no control over the flow (because there isn't any flow), versioning has to be bolted on and security is managed by the user.

Excel is a liability.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#188

Post by anothernewdude »

fleddr wrote: post #90

Excel runs the world. Every large company claiming to be ERP-native is telling lies. Shit gets done in Excel, and is then exported back into ERP, if at all. Things you would consider quite irresponsible to be done in Excel, is done in Excel regardless. Indeed, that annual financial report of a Fortune 500 boils down to financialresults_v2_nowaitonemorechange_final_FINAL_withcomments_official.xlsx" My g/f works for on…

Excel is what you hope your competition is using.

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#189

Post by jrm4 »

elefanten wrote: post #43
jrm4 wrote: post #6

As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)

I feel like I'm stuck in a timeloop. I swear I've read almost this exact comment as the top comment of a different (monthly) "Hacker News debates Excel" thread

Honestly, I think that speaks to the massively huge gap in this space. There's no technical reason we couldn't have a Hypercard-esque development platform that e.g. any professor of any discipline could use to make an app. (I'm in higher-ed, that's where my brain wen)

Re: Excel never dies (2021)

#190

Post by Jorge1o1 »

collegeburner wrote: post #152
adepressedthrow wrote: post #50

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you. I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabi…

as somebody who is very experienced with both writing crud apps and excel there's still a lot of cases where excel wins. a big one for me is making m&a models, stuff like that, excel is better bc you can organize view and move around data, re run calculations, whatever else in a tighter loop. and it's better at taking data in kinda inconsistent formats. there's a reason it is still king of IB, PE, all the finance wor…

Exactly right about the seeing the data and rerunning calculations.

The programmers who look down their nose at Excel are doing the exact same thing in Jupyter Notebooks and in their REPLs.

>I can see the state of any given variable at any time >I can rerun the same function on different inputs, or different functions on the same inputs >All without having to restart my program!

Remind you of anything?

Anybody who does print(df.head()) is pining for Excel…

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