The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

I think this is a really unfair comment. Excel is a very powerful tool. It's great for financial modelling and prototyping, for example. It can be great for testing out different scenarios and investigating likely outcomes.

It's also something that most people in most businesses have installed and as such, can be incredibly helpful for sharing data, models, etc. The collaborative editing in Office 365 adds a new dimension in that (finally) we don't have to email round documents and implement half-cocked versioning any more (though plenty of people still do), and multiple people can make changes at the same time.

If you want to slag off any of the applications in Microsoft's Office suite then the correct answers (and I don't think this is particularly controversial) are Outlook and Teams. If you want real productivity destroyers and daily pain, look no further.

Excel? It's great.

Yes, it can be misused, but so can Python, Rust, C++, JavaScript, and every other tool, language, and platform at our disposal. So can a circular saw for that matter. That doesn't make any of them bad tools.

Spreadsheets are DAGs.

Spreadsheet is the greatest SW ever invented, that's why it's so dangerous.

* The Utility of Spreadsheets

No single application has been as widely adopted by as wide a number of people for such a wide range of uses as the spreadsheet. Love them or hate them, but the spreadsheet metaphor is at once highly useful, highly adaptable, and highly usable requiring minimal support to extract needed value.

The spreadsheet, with all its questionable glory, is here to stay. From the first Visicalc to Excel 2300 I don't think we'll see the end of spreadsheets for a long time coming.

I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code.

Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption that doing anything at all with a gui is easy and frictionless. I don't know how to do anything in excel. If I have to look up how to make a plot in excel, I will have to find some article on the internet of how to do that in my particular excel version. Excel is tough software to use that only becomes easier after you spend time with it (hint hint, just like programming). If I don't know how to make a plot in R, I might also have to find an article. It's no different, no harder, usually easier in fact, to just do the job in R. All these common tasks in R or excel are all 5 min articles worth of information you have to cram in your head.

It's not hard to code, children do it. I'd love to see spreadsheet power users realize that they could be working with much simpler things like parsing plain text files with a few lines of code rather than trying to open some macro heavy spreadsheet on the shared network drive that takes 5 mins just to open on the work issued workstation. I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel. Microsoft is probably pretty happy that their software is so baked into these different academic curriculums, keeping it alive in industry going forward for an entire working persons career after college.