7 ms·

People love excel and Photoshop. I’ve never met any heavy excel user that prefers any other spreadsheet software or even has anything negative to say about it.

by ch4s3 7y ago

fasicle 7y ago
Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.
- sam_lowry_ 7y ago
  Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.
  - throwaway744678 7y ago
    I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    Wait, really? As in '=somme(A1:A10)' to add a column?
    - Udik 7y ago
      Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.
      - wolco 7y ago
        People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.
        Udik 7y ago
        The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing. We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever. So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language.
  - realusername 7y ago
    That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English.
  - dfox 7y ago
    Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains en_US syntax), but this difference is even in the format of CSV files processed by excel (there is significant portion of the world, where the C in CSV stands for semiColon, as far as excel is concerned)
Tsarbomb 7y ago
I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis. The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance. Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined.
- probablybroken 7y ago
  That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.
  - juped 7y ago
    That's because you don't know how to use Excel (this isn't a knock on you, no one ever tells people how to use Excel). Excel sheets have a hard row limit of around a million rows, but long before you approach that you will have moved your data into the "Data Model", which is a relational table engine stapled on to Excel, or to some other backend which you will query from Excel (often via the Data Model).
- kragen 7y ago
  > big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone. Somebody needs to get over himself.
  - untog 7y ago
    But if Google Sheets can't fit the data they are using, it is by definition "big data", even if it's not Big Data. I think this over-protectiveness of the definition doesn't really serve anyone.
ysr23 7y ago
i used to be a heavy excel user, when i worked on windows, it was great for eyeballing data quickly, now, in a different job, i use a mac, i would really do anything i can to avoid using excel - visidata FTW http://visidata.org/ http://visidata.org/ . I really don't miss excel at all
throwaway744678 7y ago
Regarding Excel, its Mac version is terrible. Our heavy users have to run the Windows version in a dedicated Parallels VM to get anything done once the sheet contains more than a few hundred rows.
AJ007 7y ago
Yeah that was a very bizarre grouping of software. I’ve never before heard Photoshop or Excel referred to as enterprise. There is a lot of bad enterprise software out there, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are basically catalogs of it. The fundamental problem as I’ve seen it relates to contracts and integration. Good software, the user can bail at any time. There is a very simple set of red flags: the company doesn’t list a price, you have to talk to a sales person, and you have to sign a long term contract. I’m not aware of any software that fits those three that is enjoyed by its users.
__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
Half of the people I know who love Excel in that way would now be making significantly more money if they didn't. These people fall into two groups: The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now. The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up. On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago. The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well. They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.
- xamuel 7y ago
  Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for years and years!
- afarrell 7y ago
  > would now be making significantly more money if they didn't Er, I think reality is closer to "they would be making significantly more money if they loved python more than Excel". A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair.
- rrdharan 7y ago
  You said "half of the people.. would be making significantly more" and then proceeded with further grouping. I assume the subgrouping applies to that same half? The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants...
khendron 7y ago
The great thing about Excel is that it is easy and intuitive to use just the basics, and it is difficult to accidentally stumble onto its advanced and complicated features by accident. With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.
tomatocracy 7y ago
Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience: - lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA. - weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to fix it. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel - lack of decent built in formula tracing (ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree). There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in. - lack of a decent way to see what’s changed between two versions of a spreadsheet I’d also say there’s an inordinate amount of abusing Excel to do database tasks out there. People have spreadsheets which take minutes to recalculate which could be done in less than a second even using Access, let alone a ‘proper’ DB.
- wolco 7y ago
  You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    If you're going to break compatibility, at least fucking fix the dates. http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    It’s not new features. Sometimes for no particular reason, a sheet which uses no new features isn’t backwards compatible. In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.
braindeath 7y ago
Well there isn’t any better spreadsheet software in 2019. Like what even comes close in terms of features and fit? Photoshop. I think it’s a tiny little more mixed opinion of the overall program in terms of UX, but again, the closest replacement might be Affinity. And that is too new.

People love excel and Photoshop. I’ve never met any heavy excel user that prefers any other spreadsheet software or even has anything negative to say about it.

by ch4s3 7y ago

People love excel and Photoshop. I’ve never met any heavy excel user that prefers any other spreadsheet software or even has anything negative to say about it.

fasicle 7y ago

Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.

sam_lowry_ 7y ago
Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.
- throwaway744678 7y ago
  I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  Wait, really? As in '=somme(A1:A10)' to add a column?
  - Udik 7y ago
    Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.
    - wolco 7y ago
      People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.
      - Udik 7y ago
        The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing. We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever. So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language.
- realusername 7y ago
  That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English.
- dfox 7y ago
  Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains en_US syntax), but this difference is even in the format of CSV files processed by excel (there is significant portion of the world, where the C in CSV stands for semiColon, as far as excel is concerned)

Tsarbomb 7y ago

I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis. The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance. Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined.

probablybroken 7y ago
That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.
- juped 7y ago
  That's because you don't know how to use Excel (this isn't a knock on you, no one ever tells people how to use Excel). Excel sheets have a hard row limit of around a million rows, but long before you approach that you will have moved your data into the "Data Model", which is a relational table engine stapled on to Excel, or to some other backend which you will query from Excel (often via the Data Model).
kragen 7y ago
> big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone. Somebody needs to get over himself.
- untog 7y ago
  But if Google Sheets can't fit the data they are using, it is by definition "big data", even if it's not Big Data. I think this over-protectiveness of the definition doesn't really serve anyone.

ysr23 7y ago

i used to be a heavy excel user, when i worked on windows, it was great for eyeballing data quickly, now, in a different job, i use a mac, i would really do anything i can to avoid using excel - visidata FTW http://visidata.org/ http://visidata.org/ . I really don't miss excel at all

throwaway744678 7y ago

Regarding Excel, its Mac version is terrible. Our heavy users have to run the Windows version in a dedicated Parallels VM to get anything done once the sheet contains more than a few hundred rows.

AJ007 7y ago

Yeah that was a very bizarre grouping of software. I’ve never before heard Photoshop or Excel referred to as enterprise. There is a lot of bad enterprise software out there, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are basically catalogs of it. The fundamental problem as I’ve seen it relates to contracts and integration. Good software, the user can bail at any time. There is a very simple set of red flags: the company doesn’t list a price, you have to talk to a sales person, and you have to sign a long term contract. I’m not aware of any software that fits those three that is enjoyed by its users.

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago

Half of the people I know who love Excel in that way would now be making significantly more money if they didn't. These people fall into two groups: The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now. The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up. On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago. The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well. They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.

xamuel 7y ago
Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for years and years!
afarrell 7y ago
> would now be making significantly more money if they didn't Er, I think reality is closer to "they would be making significantly more money if they loved python more than Excel". A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair.
rrdharan 7y ago
You said "half of the people.. would be making significantly more" and then proceeded with further grouping. I assume the subgrouping applies to that same half? The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants...

khendron 7y ago

The great thing about Excel is that it is easy and intuitive to use just the basics, and it is difficult to accidentally stumble onto its advanced and complicated features by accident. With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.

tomatocracy 7y ago

Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience: - lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA. - weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to fix it. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel - lack of decent built in formula tracing (ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree). There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in. - lack of a decent way to see what’s changed between two versions of a spreadsheet I’d also say there’s an inordinate amount of abusing Excel to do database tasks out there. People have spreadsheets which take minutes to recalculate which could be done in less than a second even using Access, let alone a ‘proper’ DB.

wolco 7y ago
You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  If you're going to break compatibility, at least fucking fix the dates. http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  It’s not new features. Sometimes for no particular reason, a sheet which uses no new features isn’t backwards compatible. In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.

braindeath 7y ago

Well there isn’t any better spreadsheet software in 2019. Like what even comes close in terms of features and fit? Photoshop. I think it’s a tiny little more mixed opinion of the overall program in terms of UX, but again, the closest replacement might be Affinity. And that is too new.