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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

#181

Post by Affric »

nradov wrote: post #170
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 en…

I worked in a place where excel was used for ad-hoc calculations. We became a Google shop.

Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.

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

#182

Post by cartoonfoxes »

andersa wrote: post #70
SoftTalker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "paste with styles" default is one of the worst things ever IMO. It's almost never what I want.

I hate it so much... some programs are even worse, they don't take ctrl shift v to get rid of the garbage. I've made it a habit to first paste stuff in a text editor, copy it again, and then paste it into programs like outlook so the formatting won't be all messed up... Still don't know of a single case where the "feature" was useful.

Try the "Paste as plain text" tool in PowerToys - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/advanced....

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

#183

Post by Affric »

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…

Write a piece of software that ends Excel’s dominance and then I will take your opinion seriously.

I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.

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

#184

Post by extr »

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 pretty good now. I prefer the 365 web version to the native Mac version. It doesn't support some power features but actually has better hotkey support.

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

#185

Post by jimnotgym »

Karellen wrote: post #168
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...

Because there are so many spreadsheets? My team probably created 100 last week.

Now think of 100 pieces of software that you are confident are 100% error free?

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

#186

Post by benhurmarcel »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #160
pixelatedindex wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

> What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? Tables.

Google Sheets has tables now

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/05/tables-in-go...

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

#187

Post by grvbck »

mannyv wrote: post #35

Excel is probably the most useful application ever made. Pretty much every professional services implementation and technical account management engagement is done via excel. For me, I've used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It's super easy at this point to see anything with it. It's well worth any price for sure. It's really the only reason…

[flagged]

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

#188

Post by LikesPwsh »

foobiekr wrote: post #151
nuancebydefault wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

neither of those are useful for the next stage of analysis.

Csv is much more useful than Excel.

Pdf is much less useful.

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

#189

Post by remus »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #172
Karellen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much. In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.

While it's true that an auditor can look at an excel spreadsheet, my experience is that they'll never really understand what's happening for anything more than the most basic spreadsheets. It's far too easy to build a spreadsheet that's completely inscrutable, and you end up with an audit that's very shallow.

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

#190

Post by 1_1xdev1 »

m463 wrote: post #180
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…

I remember my attempts to use numbers on a mac to pull up some spreadsheets. It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW. Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.

It's unbearably slow even opening and filtering a small CSV file (100s of rows).
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