3 ms·

Wish he would turn Excel around. Such an important product, but so buggy. Very bug ridden. Why doesn't it get better?

vikramkr 6y ago
What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  > I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
- racl101 6y ago
  Like for example, just off the top of my head: - Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it. - Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset. I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer. - Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make. That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there? Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done. I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel. That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.
InitialLastName 6y ago
In the case of Excel, I'd be willing to bet that for any given bug ∃ at least one spreadsheet that relies on that bug to make multi-million dollar decisions. More importantly, the people who use the above spreadsheets are the ones who give Microsoft the real money, and therefore the ones whose cries are heard the most loudly.

What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently

orthoxerox 6y ago
> I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
racl101 6y ago
Like for example, just off the top of my head: - Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it. - Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset. I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer. - Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make. That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there? Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done. I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel. That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.

InitialLastName 6y ago

In the case of Excel, I'd be willing to bet that for any given bug ∃ at least one spreadsheet that relies on that bug to make multi-million dollar decisions. More importantly, the people who use the above spreadsheets are the ones who give Microsoft the real money, and therefore the ones whose cries are heard the most loudly.