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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

#211

Post by foobiekr »

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...

Spreadsheets let you click any field and understand where it came from. Excel can be thought of as an amazing post-execution debugger where you can get a previous output and value for almost any piece of memory ("cell"). I would love a debugger that could do this post-execution for some output.

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

#212

Post by alwillis »

copperx wrote: post #88
AnonC wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Calc on my personal machine. > What can Excel do that Calc can’t? For one, a working copy paste. Seriously, I’ve lived with a copy paste bug in LibreOffice Calc (Windows) for years (it wasn’t yet fixed as of a few months ago). It will either paste an older copy or not paste anything even though I just hit Ctrl+C (sometimes multiple times) within Calc. This is one of the most irritating things about Calc. Fonts…

Excel also has that program synthesis algorithm to fill cells following a pattern. I haven't seen it anywhere else.

I believe Numbers has what's you're talking about [1]:

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/numbers/autofill-cells-tan0e...

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

#213

Post by ianand »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #141

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…

> 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.

FWIW one my frustrations with Excel is how it does freezing of rows. I find Google's appraoch more intuitive. But the issues on computation I agree with (see my other comment on this post).

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

#214

Post by Symbiote »

timomaxgalvin wrote: post #165
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?

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.

REPL is far older than Excel, it's from the 1960s.

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

#215

Post by fragmede »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #198
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.

If you do any serious financial planning for a startup or small business, Excel is vastly superior to Google Sheets. The multi sheet formulas can get very complicated and web based tools can’t perform as well as desktop software.

Where does the syntax differ between Google sheets and Excel that multisheet formulas are more complicated in Google sheets vs Excel?

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

#216

Post by alwillis »

baq wrote: post #7
smallerdemon wrote: post #5

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.

Numbers could be nice if it was fast. Unfortunately it’s dog slow. It’s good enough with the simplest formulas, but once you try to actually use it for anything, it becomes unbearable.

Certainly Numbers 14.2 on a recent Mac isn't slow.

Not saying you're doing this but it's not uncommon for someone to say something is slow when it's a version from 10 years ago.

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

#217

Post by Dylan16807 »

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 need you to explain why those other tools are like notepad instead of just another IDE.

Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct.

(And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)

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

#218

Post by fragmede »

leptons wrote: post #89
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 can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

You're pretty sure it's the wrong tool, but you can't imagine a use case for a fairly basic feature of said tool?

Why do I now doubt your assertion?

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

#219

Post by Cordiali »

bcoates wrote: post #38
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…

There's PowerQuery, built into Excel. It can do some great stuff (love me some fuzzy join) but the ergonomics are apocalyptic. This is actually the root problem of trying to improve or extend Excel--it has a truly ancient, horribly broken sharing/ipc/embedding model that is integrated into everything and can't be easily fixed or worked around.

Power Query/M is the only functional language I've used, a couple years ago. I actually quite liked it, I even built up a collection of my own functions.

It's just a pity the editor is literally worse than Notepad. And the implementation wants to reload a file twenty times. And the security stuff doesn't really work, so you're constantly turning that off. And and and.

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

#220

Post by lolinder »

jimnotgym wrote: post #200
oneplane wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Example: if you need to visualise your data from multiple sources company-wide, we'd have Tableau (and training, access, templates, portals etc) for example. That means you do it there as per instruction, and you don't go trying to setup some home-brew graph in excel that you manually regenerate every day and forget to generate when you are on vacation. Then your CFO calls up and says, 'I have a meeting in 30 minute…

Exactly. When a process is important enough and repeated often enough, it will move into a more formal system. But most of the time spent running a business is at the fringes of what has been automated and formalized, and this isn't an accident—the automated processes are there precisely because they reduce or eliminate the human time. That means most of the humans (outside of front-line customer support or similar) tend to be working on stuff that is substantially less well-defined than what OP is imagining.

Which again gets to my point about the weird perspective on business that we have as software developers. We're called in exclusively to work on those parts of the business that are deemed sufficiently repetitive to be worth automating. That dramatically skews our perception of what running the business should look like.

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