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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

#311

Post by makingstuffs »

whall6 wrote: post #157
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…

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…

> 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 have been using for several years.

This! I love Cursor’s IDE but, boy, does it really sh*t me off everytime I update it and they remove the keybinding for CMD + SHFT + L.

Like, seriously, you couldn’t chose a different combination for your added feature’s shortcut!?

It’s not like the ‘find all instances of’ shortcut is some hidden, unused gem, which you have to tickle the Gruffalo in order to access! It’s one of the most important shortcuts!

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

#312

Post by max51 »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #298
pixelatedindex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you have millions of rows you might have trouble with excel. Other than that, from a data storage perspective an Excel is just a database that’s human readable.

Not really. It generally won't have a schema. You generally can't write queries against it.

> You generally can't write queries against it.

Yes you can, there are a lot of different ways of doing it depending on what type of data you have and how you structured it.

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

#313

Post by lostlogin »

owenmarshall wrote: post #150
thibautg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand either, but I would be genuinely interested in what "mailing a payment" means in practice. Is it like sending a check by mail or some kind of paper bank transfer?

Sending a check via mail is infrequently done, but it happens. I just paid my annual property taxes that way. My options were: * mailing a check * paying via credit card over the phone for a hefty surcharge * cash in person In my case, I used my online banking to send the amount to the mailing address on the bill. In some cases - for large companies, typically - my bank can send the remittance electronically. In othe…

You say ‘the cheque is in the mail’ when you intend to ignore an instruction whilst pretending to comply.

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

#314

Post by max51 »

Andrex wrote: post #232
arcbyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Sheets doesnt have Solver in the consumer version for one. In reference to your second statement though, I also dont always carry my laptop but it doesn't matter because my spreadhseets are in onedrive too, so I can close my laptop and open my phone and have the same spreadsheet with zero thought.

What problem does Solver solve? Reading the overview, I don't really understand how it would be useful. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/define-and-solve-... > For example, you can change the amount of your projected advertising budget and see the effect on your projected profit amount. I can do this without Solver.

The main use of the solver is for something that definitely cannot be done without programming vba macro. You use it to find the optimal value in a cell based on the result in a different cell. You have a cell that excels will solve, a cell with the objective and constraints.

For example, let's say you have a spreadsheet to calculate the capacity of a steel column based on its height and cross-section/material. If you wanted to run the calculation backward and find the height that will give you a very specific capacity, you could do it manually by playing with the height until you find it or you can let Excel do it for automatically with the solver.

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

#315

Post by iancmceachern »

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…

Its the same for many aspects of engineering, equally applies. Thank you

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

#316

Post by max51 »

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…

>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

The interface is customizable. You can remove any icons or group of icons on the ribbon that you don't like and you can reorganize them in any way you want. Just right click on the ribbon and click "customize the ribbon".

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

#317

Post by mr_toad »

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…

The auditors use it, the CFO expects it, it’s all the interns know. These are reasons to have to use it, not to like it.

At best it’s an arranged marriage, at worst it’s Stockholme syndrome.

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

#318

Post by max51 »

nocman wrote: post #50
baq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used Excel and Calc and the short answer is ‘everything’. Excel is faster, more reliable and has a much bigger community. Calc is ok if you want to work with small spreadsheets and don’t care about the occasional bug.

not the parent, but 'everything' is a mostly unhelpful answer. A few important concrete examples would be much more interesting. In fairness, you did somewhat, but I would be interested in some more details.

It's like asking what are the differences between Visual Studio and Notepad++. Literally >90% of the tools in Excel don't exist in Calc. And there are big ones in the list (eg. pivot table, vba macros, solver), not just small feature..

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

#319

Post by listenallyall »

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...

Software is both testable and auditable, and yet, bugs still exist! Even in open-source code which is also freely and publicly reviewable.

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

#320

Post by throwaway2037 »

chaps wrote: post #161
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…

Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.

What year?
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