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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

#81

Post by pixelatedindex »

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…

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

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

#82

Post by ddingus »

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 is a great skill to have.

When I set Win 11 or earlier version PCs for others, I always load up Void Tools "Everything" and then swing by FossHUB for the full set of tools.

Libre Office, Inkscape, and many more all go on the machine.

And then I explain what they just got and what it is worth. Almost everyone ends up being able to use the OSS tools.

Doing this saves a ton of money!

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

#83

Post by pixelatedindex »

kenjackson wrote: post #76
zwarag wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#84

Post by ddingus »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #29
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.

I have private information in my files, and I don't want to share it with google. Google will scan it, use it for ad profiling, sell to whomever and store all commits for eternity. Quote probably government has access too. And, of course, they will use it for AI training, which could be reverse-engineered in the future to extract training data.

Exactly.

I always have at least one machine setup with all local tools and storage.

Any new ideation and certainly anything private gets done on that computer first.

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

#85

Post by arcbyte »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #81
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…

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

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.

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

#86

Post by BobaFloutist »

throwaway106382 wrote: post #16

I’ve only ever used Libre(open) Office Calc since I’ve never paid for or bothered to pirate office before. What can Excel do that Calc can’t? I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.

FWIW, a permanent 1-machine Excel-only license key is pretty affordable on G2A et al.

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

#87

Post by kspacewalk2 »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #81
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…

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

You can use Excel in the exact same way with Microsoft 365.

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

#88

Post by copperx »

AnonC wrote: post #52
throwaway106382 wrote: post #16

I’ve only ever used Libre(open) Office Calc since I’ve never paid for or bothered to pirate office before. What can Excel do that Calc can’t? I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.

I use Calc on my personal machine. > What can Excel do that Calc can’t? For one, a working copy paste. Seriously, I’ve lived with a copy paste bug in LibreOffice Calc (Windows) for years (it wasn’t yet fixed as of a few months ago). It will either paste an older copy or not paste anything even though I just hit Ctrl+C (sometimes multiple times) within Calc. This is one of the most irritating things about Calc. Fonts…

Excel also has that program synthesis algorithm to fill cells following a pattern. I haven't seen it anywhere else.

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

#89

Post by leptons »

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…

I can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

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

#90

Post by orev »

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…

I suspect that your database background is causing you to think too formally about how people structure Excel data. For the vast majority, they’re not normalizing data, running queries on sheets, etc. I can easily see this as one tab per account, then pulling in specific cells on other tabs for summaries and other analysis.
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