> Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I

> Excel is an incredible enabler, and unfortunately it is indiscriminate in that it also enables people to do the wrong thing. The solution here is education I feel. As someone who's both worked in education and is a designer for a living, I've seen this argument a thousand times about a thousand things, and while there's sometimes merit in it, it's usually a cop-out. Why not bake some of the education into the product, rather than treat them as separate? You probably can't have finance 101 in there, but excel is an example of a product whose internal documentation is rarely sufficient to answer even basic questions. Most of it is also at the basic level of what some function is, rather than how to solve higher level problems or why you'd choose one approach over the other. This approach isn't unique either, there's lots of education technology exploring the overlap between learning and doing within a single tool. The reason we don't see this more is it involves a different team composition than traditional software teams, which tend to not even consider documentation a central part of the product experience, let alone teaching. I agree with any tool capable of doing complex enough things, there's a discipline and an art to its use. But to say Excel doesn't really have a place to improve here is false, it's just stuck in its ways like lots of mature software is.