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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

#21

Post by CogitoCogito »

hotsauceror wrote: post #17
standardUser wrote: post #6

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known prob…

I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one. Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation? I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.

To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.

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

#22

Post by terminalbraid »

I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too.

You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of "programming".

However, due to whatever environment, desired or perceived skillsets (or limitations), other pressures, people stay and remain with that local tooling minimum for things that should have outgrown it. If you ever meet an office's "excel person" you instantly understand this phenomena.

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

#23

Post by quickthrowman »

standardUser wrote: post #6

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known prob…

> It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.

I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts.

You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel.

What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?

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

#24

Post by MostlyStable »

I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files.

Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.

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

#27

Post by fifilura »

MostlyStable wrote: post #24

I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files. Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (althou…

Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.

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

#28

Post by MostlyStable »

terminalbraid wrote: post #22

I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too. You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of "programming". However, due to whatever environ…

R is mostly benefiting from network effects. Everyone in the life sciences uses it (I think economists mostly use Statista and engineers/physicists seem to use a lot of MatLab?), which means that all the things that they need get R libraries (and blog posts explaining how to do them, and publications validating their use, etc.). And the way that academic scientists work mean that most of the downsides of R don't actually matter.

I will completely agree with almost any list of deficiencies that you come up with for R. But I will disagree that almost anything on that list actually matters for an academic lab using it to conduct analyses.

As for it's use outside of academia, I couldn't comment.

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

#29

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

vlovich123 wrote: post #2

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

I have private information in my files, and I don't want to share it with google. Google will scan it, use it for ad profiling, sell to whomever and store all commits for eternity. Quote probably government has access too.

And, of course, they will use it for AI training, which could be reverse-engineered in the future to extract training data.

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

#30

Post by thimabi »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #3
vlovich123 wrote: post #2

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

But then you have all the usability issues of a complex app shoehorned into a browser. I'll always use a native application when it's available.

Not disagreeing, but I find it very ironic that there’s little difference in performance between Excel as a native app and as a web app. I don’t know if that mostly reflects the technical prowess of the web dev team or the inefficiencies of the native app.
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