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The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on tools the employees learn once and never look back. Coming from engineering, CS pe
by screye 7y ago
The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on tools the employees learn once and never look back.
Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.
The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath, because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.
Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.
Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.
I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.
- normalnorm 7y ago> onboard onto Another way to say this is: "learn".
- jgamman 7y agoi think 'onboard' might refer to the wider context of using a tool in say, a research group. it's not just you learning the tool, it's about how the group uses the tool and the historical developments in place.
- normalnorm 7y agoIt's just a tech business language mannerism. People use it for the same reasons they use "price point" instead of "price", or "usecase" instead of "use", or "form factor" instead of "size": to show that they belong to the tribe, and to sound clever while saying something that could be expressed more simply and elegantly. The jargon adds nothing, except cringe.
- groby_b 7y agoAnother way to say this is: "con". But language changed. It's almost as if it's defined by what's spoken, not by what's in a dictionary.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 7y agoAnother way to say this is: "teach". People who code for a living are used to regularly teaching themselves new things, but there are lots of folks in other corners of the organization that expect to be taught / onboarded, and it's not an entirely unreasonable expectation. I think the word "onboard" implies a cost will have to be paid (e.g. time, money, man-hours, hiring new talent, etc.), and that's what the parent poster wanted to emphasize.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoworked with a lot of techs this way. They get mad if you show them what you're trying to teach them shows up with very good instructions on the first page of google. At least half of them get pissed off :)
- eitland 7y ago> The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Another one: Excels stubborn insistence on mangling anything that can be somehow construed into a date into one :-/
- soared 7y agoFormat your column prior to pasting data, paste special > match destination formatting
- MiracleUser 7y agothe most solid way to handle it is to use data import from text file (handles csv) so you can configure the columns while looking at them Which recent excel versions you can bring that data table directly into power query as well, which is useful if youve got multiple csv you are trying to look at that are related
- sjy 7y agoYou’re right about Office being sticky, but that is changing. Heaps of people are using Google Sheets for basic spreadsheets these days. Advanced users will stick to the tools they know, but I’ve reached the same conclusion as the author of this post. Licensing issues, nagging about cloud subscriptions, inconsistencies between Windows and macOS and the lack of Linux support have become so painful in recent versions of Office that using LibreOffice no longer feels like a greater inconvenience – just a different inconvenience.
- juststeve 7y agoAt least LibreOffice runs on Linux/Windows
- jcranberry 7y agoIn my experience anyone in CS who was doing enough work for which Matlab and R to be relevant definitely found them useful, at least in the correct situations.
- HelloNurse 7y agoProprietary math software, to which I'd add Mathematica, has the specific non-value proposition that you cannot take home your precious research work from the university lab without expensive, hard to buy and impermanent licenses and subscriptions.