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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

#31

Post by HPsquared »

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…

I'm an Excel person who is branching into PowerShell. Similar "no tools required" approach.

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

#32

Post by jpc0 »

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…

I mean... I have some spreadsheets that are pretty complicated and almost certainly could be a fully fledged program but, well it's already there and I don't need to figure out whatever framework / library I need to present the data as a PDF, excel already does that...

I 100% get the appeal of excel for many tasks and realistically when used as a tool it is extremely powerful and removes a lot of things (like how to display the data) out of what I need to care about.

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

#33

Post by onionisafruit »

cendyne wrote: post #19

There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.

Soon after I started my first IT job, my boss had me fill out a spreadsheet with everybody’s local desktop password so we could do updates when they aren’t around. It was a very awkward week asking people for their passwords. That was almost 30 years ago, and I still remember a few people’s passwords.

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

#34

Post by MostlyStable »

fifilura wrote: post #27
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.

I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.

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

#35

Post by mannyv »

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 I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I've used more than 2% of it.

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

#36

Post by fsckboy »

quickthrowman wrote: post #23
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?

>don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics

so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces"

every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same.

so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each pointsize are all separate fonts, and that's what he might have too many of.

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

#37

Post by thimabi »

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…

I guess when you add type safety and tests to an app like Excel, it becomes so much closer to programming languages that it makes more sense to ditch the app and just write code directly.

Even today, complex logic in Excel is mostly done through VBA, JavaScript, Python and the like.

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

#38

Post by bcoates »

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.

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

#39

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

baq wrote: post #15
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…

Best part: Excel supports your example and many other similar quality of programmers life use cases and has been for years if not decades (e.g. named ranges and tables). For some reason people don’t use them.

A downright comical number of analytics products are crude reimplementations of lesser-known Excel features. A rudimentary understanding of pivot tables or "goal seek" can be enough to blow minds even among an audience that has used Excel on a daily basis for decades. Spreadsheets, like word processors and presentation tools, are so omnipresent that organizations tend to assume their operation is absorbed through osmosis, and therefore fail to invest in training.

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

#40

Post by datatrashfire »

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…

I think the main feature of excel that makes it the killer app it is, is that it is extremely approachable to non technical people. Making it more like programming erodes the core feature that motivates its use.
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