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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

#301

Post by JetSetIlly »

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...

I totally agree with this. I've always found debugging Excel spreadsheets to be a real challenge.

I work in accountancy and while its possible to audit the output of the spreadsheet, (as I'm sure it's possible to audit the output in other domains) as an erstwhile Software Engineer I can't help but think it would be better if I could better verify the integrity of the spreadsheet itself. It's far too easy to introduce unnoticed errors.

Other people have different views on this but I love the idea of spreadsheets but I don't like any spreadsheet software. I think there's massive room for improvement. But if you were to ask me how to improve it specifically, I couldn't really pinpoint anything.

I had a go at doing something in this space to scratch a very specific itch but of course, it doesn't address any of my complaints here. Rather, it tried to tackle another of my complaints - the lack of good support for different number bases https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Ivycel/

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

#302

Post by tyrw »

deepspace wrote: post #285
whall6 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures. If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it. One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you…

> 60 year old CFO As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.

I read the parent comment as "If I go to a 60 year old and present them a non-excel build, they will ask me why didn't I just use excel?"

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

#303

Post by nradov »

Tagbert wrote: post #280
LikesPwsh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Csv is much more useful than Excel. Pdf is much less useful.

CSV is undefined and the edge cases are very ugly. It is compatible until the import fails silently and makes a mess of the data. I also cannot contain formulas. Only data. If your process can read and write to Excel it is a much better defined format.

CSV is fully defined in RFC 4180. Of course that standard is only informative and some vendors don't implement it correctly.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt

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

#304

Post by leptons »

fragmede wrote: post #286
leptons wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure, nine is a lot, but your comment says "more than 1 font". Without arguing the semantics of what you meant by "font", hopefully using different font sizes and emphasis (bold/italics) do make sense to you. If those make sense, then using a different font entirely shouldn't be too complicated to see as a feature that an Excel user who's not using it for graphics design reasonably want. Legibility is an important co…

[flagged]

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

#305

Post by ksec »

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 keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows.

You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.

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

#306

Post by dartos »

ksec wrote: post #305
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 keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows. You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.

“Entrenched” isn’t the same as “very good”

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

#307

Post by eviks »

oneplane wrote: post #265
mopsi wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that you mentioned PIM systems. I've worked with product information systems from small 3-man companies all the way to Fortune 500 companies, and without exception, their PIM systems have been total dogshit: slow, extremely unintuitive, limited in functionality and borderline unusable. When I need a list of product names, barcodes, weight and dimensions, nothing beats a simple Excel table that can be quickly t…

Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel. On top of that, we're also not going to have everyone do a little bit of PIM here and there, we stream 80 to 90 PIM mutations per second across various systems. You get a PIM frontend with appropriate access and that's it. Technically, the only real PIM work the teams do is corrections, there is practically no manual entry. Luckily for us, we p…

> Our live PIM database is over 2TB, we're not going to copy that to excel.

And you wouldn't need to, you would extract a much smaller subset to Excel and enjoy a superior user interface further analysing that

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

#308

Post by eviks »

kjellsbells wrote: post #77

Reading these comments, I think I might be a dinosaur, but Excel (native, Windows) has a really good keybindings UI (you press Alt, and all the key choices light up), and the ability to record actions as macros and then inspect the code is absolutely gold for automation. I know VBA is profoundly uncool and all that, but boy, if there was a better native IDE inside Excel with Copilot helping me along, I would be throw…

The alt chords are the only good part of the keybinding UI, otherwise it's all bad unergonomic combos and difficult customization

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

#309

Post by eviks »

gregates wrote: post #49
dartharva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel leaves GSheets and all its alternatives in the dust in terms of performance and stability. I used to maintain MIS trackers in Google Sheets once, and when my company made the inevitable shift to MS Suite I saw an immediate improvement. FWIW I'm 25.

Well, not all its alternatives. There's one spreadsheet out there that has better performance than Excel: https://rowzero.io/home

How is its offline performance?

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

#310

Post by ChicagoDave »

fragmede wrote: post #215
ChicagoDave wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s the required cpu cycles you’re not going to get in any browser based app.
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