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You can find idiosyncrasies about any tool. Excel is a fine tool for 99% of use cases. Sure, it's quirky here and there, but the sheer amount of work that gets

• dllthomas 6y ago
  Let's consider three claims: 1) X delivers tremendous value. 2) X has some significant problems. 3) X has no problems. Obviously 1 and 3 are compatible. I claim 1 and 2 are also compatible (and, actually, not uncommon...). You said that "[t]here's nothing wrong with Excel", and someone responded with an example of a problem that they considered significant. If we read "there's nothing wrong with Excel" as a strong claim of 3, then that's obviously a refutation of your claim. You could argue that the specific problems are not actually significant enough to rise to the level of notice. You could argue that they are not, in fact, problems at all. You could argue that you didn't, in fact, mean to make claim 3 in any strong sense (which I think is what was actually going on here - that's valid, English works that way). You've instead interpreted it as a flawed refutation of claim 1 (and took the opportunity to demean your conversation partner). I don't think that's productive.
• croes 6y ago
  Excel is good at what it was developed for. Unfortunately, it is often used for other things. For example, in this case as a database. This leads to the fact that departments build solutions that work at first sight but have errors in special cases that are difficult to detect and debug.