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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

#61

Post by vlovich123 »

baq wrote: post #60
vlovich123 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re talking about it in a professional environment. That won’t matter if the people are growing up on GSheets today & demand that tool from their employer. Very old tale in SW.

Employers will tell them that their serious sheets only work in excel and it’s similar enough that they’ll figure it out and they’ll be right on both counts.

Depends on the profession. The company might shell out money for accounting to use excel. But PMs, engineers, TPMs, etc etc are likely to be told “hey we’re using google workplaces and aren’t going to buy you an excel license” unless you can make a very convincing case. That represents a shrinking pie for Excel even if specific professional use remains on Excel while everyone else moves on. Similar stuff happened with things like COBOL, IBM mainframes, etc. That’s why Microsoft competes with their 365 offering, but Google really put a dent in Microsoft’s near monopoly on OS+productivity tools that they built up and cemented in the 90s/early 00’s.

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

#62

Post by dartharva »

vlovich123 wrote: post #56
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.

I think you’re talking about it in a professional environment. That won’t matter if the people are growing up on GSheets today & demand that tool from their employer. Very old tale in SW.

GSheets are honestly a nightmare to use in case you have a nontrivial volume of data to work on. It won't do for most enterprise uses, especially in BI.

I recall how many hoops I had to get into to convert one data dump into anything readable on it. And the update latency goes up to several minutes for the same job that Excel would take barely a second to finish. No non-stupid employer will have their team use GSheets for anything serious no matter what "youngsters" may demand. Also, on a side note I haven't seen a single instance where any business decision was made keeping into account what young employees were originally familiar with.

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

#63

Post by SoftTalker »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #21
hotsauceror wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one. Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation? I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.

To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.

The "paste with styles" default is one of the worst things ever IMO. It's almost never what I want.

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

#64

Post by dartharva »

thimabi wrote: post #30
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have all the usability issues of a complex app shoehorned into a browser. I'll always use a native application when it's available.

Not disagreeing, but I find it very ironic that there’s little difference in performance between Excel as a native app and as a web app. I don’t know if that mostly reflects the technical prowess of the web dev team or the inefficiencies of the native app.

That's incorrect. Not only is the web app drastically trimmed of features, but is also in no way a match to the native app in performance.

You can test for yourself - try doing some complex operations on large datasets on both. See which one performs better.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

fifilura wrote: post #45
MostlyStable wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The finance department in a previous job rather undramatically moved over to Google Sheets from Excel after seeing the befits of the collaboration/online environment. They got some help by me for moving out the heavy stuff to SQL/BigQuery but that was also for the better. BigQuery and Sheets integrate very well these days so they could even use a Google sheet as a UI for the queries. Rows and columns, much better tha…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by layer8 »

breckognize wrote: post #55
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…

You should check out Row Zero ( https://rowzero.io ). We launched on HN earlier this year. Our CSV handling is the best on the market. You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.

> Our CSV handling is the best on the market.

It’s ironic that you cite the one thing that being bad at hasn’t held Excel back. ;)

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

#67

Post by ChicagoDave »

I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better.

One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.

You will pry Excel from my cold dead hands.

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

#68

Post by layer8 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #61
baq wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers will tell them that their serious sheets only work in excel and it’s similar enough that they’ll figure it out and they’ll be right on both counts.

Depends on the profession. The company might shell out money for accounting to use excel. But PMs, engineers, TPMs, etc etc are likely to be told “hey we’re using google workplaces and aren’t going to buy you an excel license” unless you can make a very convincing case. That represents a shrinking pie for Excel even if specific professional use remains on Excel while everyone else moves on. Similar stuff happened wit…

In my experience it depends more on the company you’re in than on the profession.

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

#69

Post by SoftTalker »

dartharva wrote: post #4
vlovich123 wrote: post #2

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

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.

Certainly compared to early Google Sheets this is true, and it may be that first impression that a lot of older people still remember.

Google Sheets today is totally adequate for most people's spreadsheet needs. I'd believe there are cases where Excel is still better, but they are at the extreme end of "power user" use cases.

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

#70

Post by andersa »

SoftTalker wrote: post #63
CogitoCogito wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.

The "paste with styles" default is one of the worst things ever IMO. It's almost never what I want.

I hate it so much... some programs are even worse, they don't take ctrl shift v to get rid of the garbage. I've made it a habit to first paste stuff in a text editor, copy it again, and then paste it into programs like outlook so the formatting won't be all messed up...

Still don't know of a single case where the "feature" was useful.

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