4 ms·

> There are lots of things he does that are still rookie mistakes! A fun allegation, given Joel's Excel history :) Joel invented VBA: http://www.joelonsoftwar

> There are lots of things he does that are still rookie mistakes! A fun allegation, given Joel's Excel history :) Joel invented VBA: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html However, its quite likely he's not the world's best Excel poweruser :)

cm2187 10y ago
Well, that's the case for many developers, they are often not the user of their own software. The most spectacular exception is Visual Studio, written by developers for developers and one can tell. They re-write it from scratch regularly and add major features that really make sense, catering for both basic and very advanced users. Visual Studio is by far the best software that Microsoft makes. Office on the other hand is a software written by developers who are trying to imagine what a user does with it. And it shows. No major new feature since Excel 2007, and particularly very bad at certain scenarios that are really core usage of excel (linking a powerpoint deck to a spreadsheet, formula auditing (visual studio had "go to reference" forever), a VBA editor that hasn't changed since 1999, etc. If the dog doesn't die it means the food is good enough! [edit] VBA is a fantastic tool, but it's frozen in time. The worst is that Microsoft did attempt to fix it, it was called VSTA, and was basically a light version of visual studio embedded in office like the VBA editor, to be able to script office in .net. That would have been a great feature. And they shipped a version, if I remember the early version of visio had VSTA. But for some reason they killed it. Let's not change the dog's habits!
- clappski 10y ago
  While Visual Studio is a testament to understanding your users, it's not great software. Randomly slow downs (even with Visual Assist turned off) and hanging every time you open a moderate (~50 project) solution.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I am sure we can find flaws. In fact the VS2015 intellisense is a major step back. But compared to the VBA editor which litterally hasn't changed since the 90s, I mean litterally not a single new feature in 20 years! Like if that was a feature no one was using!
- greggyb 10y ago
  There are two major improvements to Excel that came in 2010 and 2013. These are Power Pivot and Power Query (Power Query is now backported to 2010 as well). Power Pivot straight up is SQL Server Analysis Services. It's a heavily optimized in-memory columnstore database engine that is exposed natively through pivot tables and charts in Excel. The fun demo is loading up a table of several hundreds of millions of rows in Power Pivot and interacting with it in a pivot table in Excel. That was back when I had 8GB of RAM. Power Query is a data shaping and transformation tool, with an expression language largely based on F# (though with an entirely different standard library and some major functionality changes). The single best feature of Power Query, though, is that it provides an audit trail of all steps applied to a dataset. This completely bypasses one of the major problems in Excel, that intermediate steps are impossible to recreate accurately. Full disclosure I am a consultant with a Microsoft partner and spend a lot of time with these tools.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I appreciate that and I am sure it may be useful to people who do data analysis against a SQL server, but I see very few of those around me. Most use excel to calculate something and for the analysis behind a powerpoint deck. None of that is ever a simple sum or average of a column. If it does involve data, it usually involves non trivial calculations that are not really suited for a database. And if it involves things like aggregating P&L or any financials, unlikely an IT dept in a large organisation will leave that in a SQL server available for any user to mess with. I don't know what proportion of users Microsoft thinks it caters to with these features but I haven't met any in my 10 years in banking. Users who do vlookups, use VBA, who need to audit a formula, who need to link a powerpoint deck to excel, etc, that I see every day. And to those, no, no new feature since 2007.
    - greggyb 10y ago
      And I see people every day using exactly these pieces of functionality to do nontrivial summarization of data, a thriving blog and forum ecosystem, and Microsoft knocking down my door because their own sales teams can't keep up with the customers wanting to use these features and the Power BI ecosystem. We all live in bubbles. I recognize mine as the above, but I don't deny that yours exists.
- waivek 10y ago
  Can you provide a source on Visual Studio being re-written from scratch? I'd like to read more on this.

cm2187 10y ago

Well, that's the case for many developers, they are often not the user of their own software. The most spectacular exception is Visual Studio, written by developers for developers and one can tell. They re-write it from scratch regularly and add major features that really make sense, catering for both basic and very advanced users. Visual Studio is by far the best software that Microsoft makes. Office on the other hand is a software written by developers who are trying to imagine what a user does with it. And it shows. No major new feature since Excel 2007, and particularly very bad at certain scenarios that are really core usage of excel (linking a powerpoint deck to a spreadsheet, formula auditing (visual studio had "go to reference" forever), a VBA editor that hasn't changed since 1999, etc. If the dog doesn't die it means the food is good enough! [edit] VBA is a fantastic tool, but it's frozen in time. The worst is that Microsoft did attempt to fix it, it was called VSTA, and was basically a light version of visual studio embedded in office like the VBA editor, to be able to script office in .net. That would have been a great feature. And they shipped a version, if I remember the early version of visio had VSTA. But for some reason they killed it. Let's not change the dog's habits!

clappski 10y ago
While Visual Studio is a testament to understanding your users, it's not great software. Randomly slow downs (even with Visual Assist turned off) and hanging every time you open a moderate (~50 project) solution.
- cm2187 10y ago
  I am sure we can find flaws. In fact the VS2015 intellisense is a major step back. But compared to the VBA editor which litterally hasn't changed since the 90s, I mean litterally not a single new feature in 20 years! Like if that was a feature no one was using!
greggyb 10y ago
There are two major improvements to Excel that came in 2010 and 2013. These are Power Pivot and Power Query (Power Query is now backported to 2010 as well). Power Pivot straight up is SQL Server Analysis Services. It's a heavily optimized in-memory columnstore database engine that is exposed natively through pivot tables and charts in Excel. The fun demo is loading up a table of several hundreds of millions of rows in Power Pivot and interacting with it in a pivot table in Excel. That was back when I had 8GB of RAM. Power Query is a data shaping and transformation tool, with an expression language largely based on F# (though with an entirely different standard library and some major functionality changes). The single best feature of Power Query, though, is that it provides an audit trail of all steps applied to a dataset. This completely bypasses one of the major problems in Excel, that intermediate steps are impossible to recreate accurately. Full disclosure I am a consultant with a Microsoft partner and spend a lot of time with these tools.
- cm2187 10y ago
  I appreciate that and I am sure it may be useful to people who do data analysis against a SQL server, but I see very few of those around me. Most use excel to calculate something and for the analysis behind a powerpoint deck. None of that is ever a simple sum or average of a column. If it does involve data, it usually involves non trivial calculations that are not really suited for a database. And if it involves things like aggregating P&L or any financials, unlikely an IT dept in a large organisation will leave that in a SQL server available for any user to mess with. I don't know what proportion of users Microsoft thinks it caters to with these features but I haven't met any in my 10 years in banking. Users who do vlookups, use VBA, who need to audit a formula, who need to link a powerpoint deck to excel, etc, that I see every day. And to those, no, no new feature since 2007.
  - greggyb 10y ago
    And I see people every day using exactly these pieces of functionality to do nontrivial summarization of data, a thriving blog and forum ecosystem, and Microsoft knocking down my door because their own sales teams can't keep up with the customers wanting to use these features and the Power BI ecosystem. We all live in bubbles. I recognize mine as the above, but I don't deny that yours exists.
waivek 10y ago
Can you provide a source on Visual Studio being re-written from scratch? I'd like to read more on this.