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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

#71

Post by intended »

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.

I think you are in good company. I’ve used excel extensively, and I’ve never even conceived of that number of fonts specifically being needed. Let alone breaking excel on fonts.

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

#72

Post by zwarag »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

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 in…

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this.

How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances 2. Year-over-year analysis 3. Category management 4. Historical tracking

Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?

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

#74

Post by financetechbro »

vlovich123 wrote: post #57
happytoexplain wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love GSheets for convenience. But as soon as you're doing anything large and complex, GSheets might as well not even exist. It's simply not viable.

GSheets is the good enough factor and the collaborative features were baked in from the start. I feel like MS struggles a bit in that respect. Look at the instructions for collaborating in Excel: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-ex...

I’ve had the pleasure of investing many hours across excel and gsheets. I’m currently at an org that uses MS suite and excel collaboration across OneDrive & Sharepoint is almost seamless now as long as long as you’re on the cloud

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

#75

Post by copperx »

xbmcuser wrote: post #41

This is one of the things LLM's have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done. I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spread…

That's cool. I'm wondering if using an LLMs could make using Pandas or R as easy as Excel.

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

#76

Post by kenjackson »

zwarag wrote: post #72
ChicagoDave wrote: post #67

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 in…

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this. How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budge…

Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets are good for? I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you’re doing.

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

#77

Post by kjellsbells »

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 throwing money at Microsoft right now.

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

#78

Post by intended »

SoftTalker wrote: post #69
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.

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.

For sure. Google sheets is good enough to be tolerable.

If a work place forced sheets on me, I’d resort to excel in the background. (I would fit in the excel power user category).

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

#79

Post by ddingus »

andersa wrote: post #70
SoftTalker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PowerPoint

Paste with source formatting or theme, I can't recall the exact name right now, rules. It means being able to mooch slides from any file and use them with no real fuss.

An alternative is to turn the slide into a bitmap.

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

#80

Post by leni536 »

andersa wrote: post #70
SoftTalker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fortunately Teams takes ctrl shift v, and it also leaves links untouched.

Unfortunately it's rather easy to mistype it as ctrl shift c, which --as you might have guessed-- is "call everyone".

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