6 ms·

Clearly you are not a power excel user. Excel is brilliant for such tables. The charting,manipulation, etl, and dramatic query functionality are astounding.

• jessaustin 9y ago
  Let's stipulate that excel gives you all the chart-formatting crap you need. Is that a reason to pull in a million rows, which is what GP is about? Surely a chart with a million things displayed is going to be awful, no matter how well formatted. A simple shell script could save these users hours of work, every time they touch this godawful sheet. Actual analytics tools would be even better.
  • specialp 9y ago
    Why would you do any of that when it opens up fine in Excel? A chart doesn't display a million things, it summarizes it. End users aren't going to be pumping stuff through shell scripts, and I personally am not in the business of writing office suite software. If people can get what they want, easily without my intervention by paying MS I am all for it. Also I don't want to support the sales department when my bash script streaming their stuff to Spark fails.
  • singhrac 9y ago
    The truth is that Excel is easier to learn than programming. Call it 'graphical programming' if you will, but Microsoft did build a very powerful piece of software that performs fantastically great for many data tasks. And many many 3rd parties built extensions (data import, cleanup/statistics, formulas and logical programs) that Just Work. I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      Excel is the most successful FP language.