12 ms·
Most people who haven't used Excel for anything more complicated than their tax returns seriously underestimate its capabilities. I've seen people use Excel as
by 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
Most people who haven't used Excel for anything more complicated than their tax returns seriously underestimate its capabilities. I've seen people use Excel as essentially a poor (and impatient) man's MATLAB, doing things like surprisingly sophisticated and responsive, albeit low-resolution, physics simulations.
- analog31 9y agoIndeed, I've seen people who were power users in the more sophisticated computational software, yet still used Excel when they found it to be useful. The hard thing for me in Excel is visualizing the data flow. Long ago I wrote a VBA macro that would return the formula contents of a cell, and I'd just put that next to each formula cell. That way, I could see what all of the formulas were doing. My sheets were hideous, but if I was working through something complicated, it helped me troubleshoot mistakes. I now prefer Jupyter/Python, but still can't claim that it's quicker for the smallest jobs.