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Excel elicits some equivalent of Stages of Grief in technical people. First, some version “it’s so dumb the world runs this way, I’ll just port a few of <use ca

by corry 6y ago

Excel elicits some equivalent of Stages of Grief in technical people. First, some version “it’s so dumb the world runs this way, I’ll just port a few of <use case> into a modern CRUD web app and people will prefer it since it will reduce errors and be in the cloud”. Then, “oh hmmm the flexibility Excel brings to the user is really hard to replicate in my CRUD app. But I’ll try.”. Then despair - “arrrg if only these dumb users would realize that the flexibility and power of Excel lead to lots of problems! Use my simple CRUD app, please!!!”. Then acceptance (and awe) - “Excel is UI, a DB, and business logic all wrapped in 1 thing that everyone already knows how to use.” Not saying Excel is perfect. Lots of us have built or are building products that do a better job at specific workflows. But surely it is one of the best pieces of software we have, and if I could only use 1 piece of software forever, it’s probably Excel.

kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
You hit the nail right on the head there.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  Feels like he's confusing "Excel" for "spreadsheet program with scripting abilities"
  - tylerrobinson 6y ago
    Can you think of another “spreadsheet program with scripting abilities” that is already installed on every business computer on the planet?
    - gbear605 6y ago
      Google Sheets is for the many companies that use Google. It’s definitely not ubiquitous, but then Excel isn’t either (my company only has a few Excel licenses for the people who are customer facing, everyone else gets Google Sheets).
  - ddingus 6y ago
    It's more like conflating spreadsheet program with scripting abilities into just being Excel. :D
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I think a lot of the love for Excel by office workers comes down to empowerment. Workers like being empowered to solve their own problems. Excel does very well. You as a non-programmer office worker can quickly make a spreadsheet that solves your problem. You can update it on your schedule as your problem changes or to explore new possibilities. You give that up as soon as you go to a CRUD app. Need to change something, put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky. Wheat would have been a few minute feedback loop with Excel is a multi-week slog. There is no other tool of which I am aware that enables the common person to sit down at a computer and make the computer do useful real world work work for them in a flexible way than Excel. I have used it for budgets, lists, form entry, and reports. In addition, it provides a very smooth on ramp into programming via the record macro button, which will write the VBA function that does what you are doing in the GUI. Most of my VBA functions started out as record macro, and then were edited to generalize. Truly an amazing piece of software.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Exactly. As a service owner of some fairly significant technology services, every time one of my colleagues “fixes” some business problem with an enterprise IT system, it’s measurably worse than a well-defined excel driven process. My favorite was when our travel and expense system moved to some Oracle monstrosity, and we literally hired full time staff to data enter expenses that were submitted on paper because field service folks were spending 5-10 hours a week on expense submission. Another great example is when almost anything is “improved” by some sort of quick and dirty interim servicenow task.
  - fpoling 6y ago
    Well, I observed the opposite effect when a complex Excel spreadsheet was replaced by an Access DB that allowed a small company to discover that they had extra assets for like 200K USD. And the original Excel author realized how much more sense the data made once he saw visualization of data constraints and relations. But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.
coderintherye 6y ago
Yes, but Google Sheets or shared Excel files in OneDrive. Otherwise the magic that is Excel gets lost in various versions in people's email attachments. Collaboration + Spreadsheet though truly is a versatile tool.
- ddingus 6y ago
  This isn't the problem you think it is. The most common use case is via seed document. People grab the seed doc, modify for their specific case, input data, get results, stuff into Powerpoint, done, next.
- johnwalkr 6y ago
  In principle, I agree. Excel files in onedrive don’t work very well. Some features are disabled (even merging cells), so very quickly you now have various versions plus a version on onedrive. You may think there is one master file but there probably isn’t. Google sheets are better (and plotting and pivot tables are much easier to use) but there’s always someone who downloads as excel and makes a new version. I almost think google drive with much more friction to export would be better.
corry 6y ago
I just realized something. Riffing on how Excel is UI/DB/biz logic in a huge unbounded zone, I think the reason it’s so popular is that people use it to build PRODUCTS. They don’t call them products, don’t sell them, but a well-built and complex spreadsheet is basically a mini app. What else do we have that’s this powerful? And don’t say Airtable, although they clearly “get it” - it’s not about files, it’s about building mini products.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  I knew an accountant that built an accounting software in Excel. He had different tables for different invoices, and Excel spreadsheet would take that data, do whatever accounting needs to be done and prepare all the reports that need to be sent to various institutions. If I remember correctly, he had a Excel file for each customer he had and just used Excel for all. It wasn't a mini app, it was a complex application used in "production" for at least 5-10 years. It's likely it is used today as well. When I saw this, I was blown away.
  - josephg 6y ago
    I don't think its even that rare. As an example, there's a popular idle game called "ngu idle", full of complex overlapping and intertwined progression systems. Someone made this spreadsheet to help you optimize your play. Some of the worksheets in this have very carefully considered UI and complex data flows. Its totally inscrutable if you've never played the game, but its more complex and well crafted than many apps on my phone: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S1JXe3kZeqzxBOVXMo2-Db6iSrfeS42oTeBuVIarjmY/edit#gid=1665387656 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S1JXe3kZeqzxBOVXMo2-...
    - skydhash 6y ago
      I once seen one used in risk evaluation for line of credits
  - trynton 6y ago
    @saberdancer: "When I saw this, I was blown away." I've seen something like that, that took a whole weekend to produce a report. I suppose it does the job, as long as the accountant doesn't mistake 30 for 0.03 (30%) in a formula.
enjeyw 6y ago
Building on this, when purist engineers trash Excel, I point out that Excel cell formulas are the only case of Functional Programming going truly mainstream.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
  This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.
  - moftz 6y ago
    I use Excel in my data processing workflow. I'll grab a small subset of the data to play around with in excel to see what it is I actually need out of it. Then, I'll do all of the real processing in python along with matplotlib for any charts I need to produce. Excel could almost entirely handle my use cases but there is usually some bit manipulation I need to do because my data is usually telemetry encoded as ASCII. Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting. I could also just use MATLAB but I'm more used to using python.
    - slaymaker1907 6y ago
      Excel is exceptionally good at telling you what the shape of your data is. I love being able to just turn something into a table and then see the distinct values as a filter. Sure, SQL and most environments can tell you distinct values of a column and their counts, but they are much slower and more cumbersome to explore with. I often start out with broad filters then go through many more specific ones depending on what I see from the first filter.
scythe 6y ago
The painful thing about Excel is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's built on extensive UX research that tries to support the existing corporate culture and workflow. In so being it reinforces that norm, which generally encodes the assumption: the people handling this data don't understand how or want to write code. It's extremely difficult to build a spreadsheet that gives those people as much power as Excel does. This is frustrating for people working in an Excel shop who know how to code. Most of them realize their coworkers don't want to learn to code. They just wish their skills could be useful.
jjoske 6y ago
Excel is great until you need to fix/extend an app that is now integral to all company operations that was made 20 years ago by that guy in sales that was good at computers and has long left.
- curiousllama 6y ago
  Replace "Excel" with "Computers" and I agree
- pbronez 6y ago
  Sure, but that has nothing to do with Excel. You could say the same thing about basically any legacy application on any stack.
  - sircastor 6y ago
    Yes,it doesn’t have anything to do with Excel, except Excel is there, has been there for 25 years and keeps getting updated and supported. I can’t speak to what gets maintained in Excel, but compared to some Win95 program, it’s in much better shape.
  - ajnin 6y ago
    It does have something to do with it in the sense that it locks code in a proprietary format that does not allow code traceability and source co trol, and does not favor best practices like code comments and commit comments. That does make maintenance harder.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  It just occurred to me that the situation is isomorphic to any runtime environment. I cannot imagine transplanting a shell script, C program, Java program (OK, maybe except for a Java program), Win32 app (OK, maybe that also), or a web-app from 20 years ago onto a modern version of the runtime and expect it to work without any major changes or fixes to account for the inevitable cases where the outside world simply decided that "we do not do things this way" any more. Cross-site scripting, password strength, political and timezone changes, many of those trip up applications too.
walrus01 6y ago
If you really want to hit your face on a desk, wait until you encounter a user who doesn't know how to tabulate or sum anything in Excel, and uses it as a big grid-based text editor, manually using a desk calculator to sum up columns, or perform various other formulas on some selection of cells. also, prepare for the user to suffer some sort of existential crisis or breakdown, possible tantrum after you show them how to do these tasks automatically with a simple excel formula.
- hnrodey 6y ago
  I'd almost prefer to see this behavior than the handful of people I've encountered who do this same exact manual math in ..... Word.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    For many people they’re all just digital paper - and they work with it like they would with a notebook.
  - mavhc 6y ago
    Why the OS doesn't allow you to select some text and perform system-wide actions on it is a mystery. Calculate, Upper/Lower/Sentence case, Search, Dictionary, etc etc
    - gmac 6y ago
      Like this? https://www.muo.com/tag/add-useful-options-mac-os-x-services-menu/ https://www.muo.com/tag/add-useful-options-mac-os-x-services...
      - mavhc 6y ago
        Seems so, https://www.gingerbeardman.com/services/ https://www.gingerbeardman.com/services/
- clausok 6y ago
  I encountered exactly this when my brother went to film school. The students would rotate roles and it was his turn to be the producer. One day I came home from work and he was having problems with his Excel-based budget sheet. I noticed that his row of sums at the bottom of one sheet had hard-coded values rather than formulas. Thinking he had inadvertently pasted over them, I told him, "Look, you killed your formulas." "What are formulas?", he asked. Turns out that he had been tallying up the columns with a calculator and then typing those totals into Excel.
arsome 6y ago
Yup, I write data analysis tooling but still one of the first things I get asked is "can I have all the raw data in a CSV?".
- lanstin 6y ago
  Never display data in a tabular format without sortable columns, and a link to the raw data as CSV/json, preferably CSV, and if possible a link to the SoR for the data source.
abandonliberty 6y ago
There's whole business that run on Excel. They shouldn't, but it's amazing.
Trasmatta 6y ago
This is literally what I spent my last two weekends doing. Not as something I wanted to sell, but for one of my own personal spreadsheet use cases. Thought I could build a web app to suit my needs better, but after some 30+ hours working on it, I'd rather just go back to the spreadsheet.
Pxtl 6y ago
My problem with Excel isn't the principle of spreadsheet software, but that it's bad spreadsheet software. It has a bad expression language and a bad API and bad type-safety and bad automatic type coercions and bad range behavior and bad copy-paste functionality... There are so many boneheaded things wrong with Excel that they can't fix because they must stay bug-compatible. So I keep dealing with text getting mangled into dates and iso8601 dates getting mangled into God knows what and papers getting examined and people finding out "oops your data got screwed up by some counterintuitive behavior of excel and your findings are all wrong".
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It's one of those things where it's bad, but it's the best we have, especially given that in some of the flaws you mention, they're pretty much copied by alternatives who want to be compatible with Excel.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > that they can't fix because they must stay bug-compatible They likely aren’t bugs. Some may have been. But they’re now expected behaviour. Moreover, by and large, they’re how non-programmers see the world.
- toss1 6y ago
  Do you know of one that does it better in terms of flexibility, data management, programmability, etc.?
- Akronymus 6y ago
  Not just automatic type coercion. But automatic DESTRUCTIVE type coercion.
- netflixandkill 6y ago
  Comically with their resources they could have put together a type-safe back end on sqllite with multiple available frontend APIs to gradually transfer users to Excel But Not Shitty, yet seem to have made no effort towards anything like that. I still see people getting date and numeric fields mangled by excel on analysis processes that take literal days to solve because it ends up recursing over all the cells multiple times, and yet even showing them a simple Python or whatever program that does the same thing in minutes, and the result is still put in excel, the next time they need something similar ... Here's another excel abomination. These aren't dumb people. They've been trained by Excel that the world is awful, slow, and error prone.
bernardv 6y ago
I second that. While it has plenty of flaws and is getting very dated, Excel has been a phenomenal tool in the land of the analysts and others who actually need to get work done and move on.
- lanstin 6y ago
  I had a big OS migration project, where we moved all the RHEL machines to Ubuntu. We had a big set of Python scripts that would go out and query a bunch of databases and logging system to get the current state of the migration each day, but we published the results as a spreadsheet that was emailed rather than some website. It worked very well to get people data they needed and to put it in a form where they could ask their own questions of the data without talking to anyone else. It worked better than I expected, having not used excel for decades.
boogies 6y ago
> if I could only use 1 piece of software forever, it’s probably Excel “And thus we see that people with prolonged exposure to nonfree software need special help.” *Commits sin against the Church of Emacs with proprietary DuckDuckGo JavaScript* Emacs has ~10 spreadsheet modes, including one for free-form calculation and one for reading Excel files (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet).
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Emacs also has a user interface that has a much steeper learning curve than Excel.
  - boogies 6y ago
    That seems pretty irrelevant to the specific quote I was addressing, but in general it’s unfortunate there’s no tech-illiterate focused distro AFAIK, because it seems like CUA-mode would get you far enough to appeal to a lot of pretty mild power users (eg. there are stories of non-technical secretaries learning to program without realizing it by learning Emacs macros).
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      The specific quote exists as part of a broader context in this thread in which the accessibility of any proposed alternative to excel is relevant. Making it relevant to point out that while emacs might be a valid alternative for some, it is not for most users.
      - boogies 6y ago
        > The specific quote exists as part of a broader context in this thread in which the accessibility of any proposed alternative to excel is relevant. Right, which is why I tried to address the next claim: > while emacs might be a valid alternative for some, it is not for most users I think a distro like Spacemacs but with cua-mode / UX targeting Office users instead of with evil-mode / UX targeting vi users could make it fairly viable for many or even most users, it seems that it already is for many users, like the secretaries I mentioned in my other comment, who considered themselves non-programmers if not non-power users (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=emacs%20secretaries&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
matchagaucho 6y ago
It's the What-If and Goal-Seeking behaviors of Excel that CRUD app developers consistently overlook.
giantDinosaur 6y ago
As I always like commenting when I see these kinds of comments: many thanks for (in a general sense) providing consulting/freelancing/general small business work well into my future.
bsder 6y ago
> Then acceptance (and awe) - “Excel is UI, a DB, and business logic all wrapped in 1 thing that everyone already knows how to use.” We had a programming language that matched that description ... Visual Basic 6 -- and Microsoft killed it because it wasn't making them enough money.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  They did not kill anything, they brought them into VB.NET, and I can tell many VBA users are quite happy to transition into VB.NET, as I experienced in a couple of life sciences corporations. Having used VB back in the day, the only thing missing are a couple of people still not getting that VB.NET with Forms is just the same deal, even Me is available.
  - bsder 6y ago
    Except that all the little controls and plugins DIDN'T transition to VB.NET--and they're what made VB6 useful to common people. And the hot code reload in VB.NET is nowhere near as useful as it was in VB6--and that was how common people debugged code. I can go on and on. VB.NET was not a useful replacement for VB6. I still know tons of businesses running VB6 code and, when they finally have to migrate, it won't be to VB.NET.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Not enough money to buy little controls from Telerik, ComponentOne, GrapeCity,....? Interactive .NET sessions have been working for several Visual Studio releases, at least all the way back to 2010. The only issue is the anti-VB.NET atittude from some VB circles.
emilsedgh 6y ago
I always hated excel. Then I met Airtable. Airtable is basically MS Access for the current age and it's absolutely amazing. When dealing with it, I realized what makes Airtable so wonderful and different from excel: It's typed! Each column has a type which allows airtable to build this easy to use featureset.
ziftface 6y ago
I think a crud app is great for "directing" the user through the common changes they will make to the data, like approving a document by clicking a button for example. But a simple tabular view of your data is really great too if you can get away with it. Sometimes it's not that useful, if for example the data is hundreds or thousands of columns wide. I think that's why something like airtable is great. It gives you the best of both worlds. All the data is backed by a simple spreadsheet, and it has an API so you can create the more custom UIs to help direct users with common tasks.
ineedasername 6y ago
I love excel, it's fantastic. I also hate excel, it causes me so many problems. Usually in the way of proliferating "shadow systems" of this sort: Them: "We need you to do X with our data." Me: "Okay, where do you see the data in the (enterprise ERP) system, I'll find the tables from there." Them: "We use Excel because the system doesn't have a place for this data." Me: "We upgraded 10 years ago. There's a place for it. How is office X getting the data they need from you?" Them: "Oh we just share an excel file each week and they add their own stuff to it. Here's 300 weekly files for the last 5 years. We really need the analysis in a few days." Me: ::tries to concat 300 excel files, discovers 50 variations on column arrangements, names, data types etc., tells department--:: "You aren't getting this in a few days. The good news is that you don't have to use Excel anymore because when I'm done, your data will be formatted & loaded into the ERP and all you'll have to do is put new stuff there too, and all analysis & reporting will be automated." Them: "But it's the full-time job of one of our staff to handled all of this stuff in Excel." Me: "Have you ever though that you needed more help in your department? Well, congratulations, you just got one 'new' full time employee." People at least then generally walk away happy, except for me as I stitch together 50 variations on 300 different excel files. That's a slight exaggeration though: Most of these offline shadow processes aren't quite that large, and staff turnover is usually fast enough that such a process doesn't age 10 years past its point of obsolescence.
- thaeli 6y ago
  Now we have Airtable and Smartsheet, where you can have a proliferation of undocumented shadow IT systems core to your business processes AND pay by the user every month for the privilege! That's progress, right?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    My general theory of shadow systems is that they're usually the product of either: 1) Poorly trained users that don't know how to use the system for their needs 2) A poorly chosen system (or system implementation) that doesn't fill the needs of the users. 2-b) This includes systems that technically do the thing users need it to do, but in such a bad/slow/sloppy way that no one wants to use it. I'm not sure which is more prevalent... I've had to say "Your system will do that for you" plenty of times, but I've also been on the other side creating shadow systems myself. One such was an ad-hoc data integration using python's splinter library to automate data download from a system w/o an API to a very kludgy "select .... from dual union" series of SQL statements to populate some of the data needed for a daily analysis. The ETL folks were already in integration hell on over-scoped projects, and also not accustomed or tooled up to run arbitrary python code-- especially any code they didn't write-- to power a process.
alexashka 6y ago
The real grief is tooling and infrastructure for software development itself. If it didn't cost a fortune to create and modify CRUD apps, Excel wouldn't be so popular. Why does Airtable, which is Excel in the cloud with a few trinkets cost so much and do so little, despite 100+ million having been poured into it? Because developing software is a nightmare every step of the way. Until that's addressed, we are stuck.
hackeredje 6y ago
SharePoint / Office is overlooked by the developers you write about here. Office/Excel clientside => SharePoint "Office Server" serverside => then write apps integrating with SharePoint. SharePoint is an application platform with Excel services on top of .Net. (so that multiple people at the same time can work on an Excel sheet via a web front-end) It is ment to make the step from local application to server application. It has auto import / workflows / api / taxonomy / search / etc ...
blntechie 6y ago
So much true. I have built many personal finance and analytical tools for my own use with Excel and Google Sheets in few mins and have extended their features as needed from there. I have been using some of these sheets for years and are better to my needs than buying an app or subscribing to a SaaS web product.
eru 6y ago
For most people in most companies, the choice is between hacking something together in Excel over the weekend that will mostly work (with a few bugs); or to give your project to the IT department and wait at least six months for them to fail anyway.
nine_k 6y ago
Spreadsheets are one of the original "bicycles for the mind". They empower users to do what users want to do, more efficiently. They have their downsides. But they allow a non-programmer express some logic and arithmetic in an interactive, iteratively built, visual reactive program. This is nearly unparalleled in the modern software landscape.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Excel ate my data four times in the past week. I prefer LibreOffice; I think it is much easier to control. Also I can tell LibreOffice not to eat my data and it listens to me.
yread 6y ago
Excel is the JavaScript of nonprogrammers.
globular-toast 6y ago
My main problem with Excel is it does many things but it's never the best tool for any job. If I could only use one piece of software forever it would be emacs. I find it sad that Excel would be considered in the same light. It makes me think of caged animals at zoos.
vagrantJin 6y ago
Excel spreadsheet is still underrated even in 2021. Regardless of the fact that governments and whole companies use it religiously.
ulucs 6y ago
Excel is an amazing piece of software if you are disciplined enough to use it well. Hell, I've even solved some Advent of Code problems on it: it's really powerful when you enable iterative calculation
hodgesrm 6y ago
> ...if I could only use 1 piece of software forever, it’s probably Excel. Google Sheets gives Excel a real run for its money. It's less powerful in many ways (example: getting data is more complicated) but makes up for it with the ability to collaborate and run multi-platform. Sheets is one of the more underrated products in the Google Apps portfolio. Disclaimer: I reached the awe stage on Excel many years ago.

by corry 6y ago

kqvamxurcagg 6y ago

You hit the nail right on the head there.

droopyEyelids 6y ago
Feels like he's confusing "Excel" for "spreadsheet program with scripting abilities"
- tylerrobinson 6y ago
  Can you think of another “spreadsheet program with scripting abilities” that is already installed on every business computer on the planet?
  - gbear605 6y ago
    Google Sheets is for the many companies that use Google. It’s definitely not ubiquitous, but then Excel isn’t either (my company only has a few Excel licenses for the people who are customer facing, everyone else gets Google Sheets).
- ddingus 6y ago
  It's more like conflating spreadsheet program with scripting abilities into just being Excel. :D

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

I think a lot of the love for Excel by office workers comes down to empowerment. Workers like being empowered to solve their own problems. Excel does very well. You as a non-programmer office worker can quickly make a spreadsheet that solves your problem. You can update it on your schedule as your problem changes or to explore new possibilities. You give that up as soon as you go to a CRUD app. Need to change something, put in a a request to IT who might get around to it in a week if you are lucky. Wheat would have been a few minute feedback loop with Excel is a multi-week slog. There is no other tool of which I am aware that enables the common person to sit down at a computer and make the computer do useful real world work work for them in a flexible way than Excel. I have used it for budgets, lists, form entry, and reports. In addition, it provides a very smooth on ramp into programming via the record macro button, which will write the VBA function that does what you are doing in the GUI. Most of my VBA functions started out as record macro, and then were edited to generalize. Truly an amazing piece of software.

Spooky23 6y ago
Exactly. As a service owner of some fairly significant technology services, every time one of my colleagues “fixes” some business problem with an enterprise IT system, it’s measurably worse than a well-defined excel driven process. My favorite was when our travel and expense system moved to some Oracle monstrosity, and we literally hired full time staff to data enter expenses that were submitted on paper because field service folks were spending 5-10 hours a week on expense submission. Another great example is when almost anything is “improved” by some sort of quick and dirty interim servicenow task.
- fpoling 6y ago
  Well, I observed the opposite effect when a complex Excel spreadsheet was replaced by an Access DB that allowed a small company to discover that they had extra assets for like 200K USD. And the original Excel author realized how much more sense the data made once he saw visualization of data constraints and relations. But then IT of bigger companies treats Access as not a real DB and often disregards it with the same contempt as Excel.

coderintherye 6y ago

Yes, but Google Sheets or shared Excel files in OneDrive. Otherwise the magic that is Excel gets lost in various versions in people's email attachments. Collaboration + Spreadsheet though truly is a versatile tool.

ddingus 6y ago
This isn't the problem you think it is. The most common use case is via seed document. People grab the seed doc, modify for their specific case, input data, get results, stuff into Powerpoint, done, next.
johnwalkr 6y ago
In principle, I agree. Excel files in onedrive don’t work very well. Some features are disabled (even merging cells), so very quickly you now have various versions plus a version on onedrive. You may think there is one master file but there probably isn’t. Google sheets are better (and plotting and pivot tables are much easier to use) but there’s always someone who downloads as excel and makes a new version. I almost think google drive with much more friction to export would be better.

corry 6y ago

I just realized something. Riffing on how Excel is UI/DB/biz logic in a huge unbounded zone, I think the reason it’s so popular is that people use it to build PRODUCTS. They don’t call them products, don’t sell them, but a well-built and complex spreadsheet is basically a mini app. What else do we have that’s this powerful? And don’t say Airtable, although they clearly “get it” - it’s not about files, it’s about building mini products.

saberdancer 6y ago
I knew an accountant that built an accounting software in Excel. He had different tables for different invoices, and Excel spreadsheet would take that data, do whatever accounting needs to be done and prepare all the reports that need to be sent to various institutions. If I remember correctly, he had a Excel file for each customer he had and just used Excel for all. It wasn't a mini app, it was a complex application used in "production" for at least 5-10 years. It's likely it is used today as well. When I saw this, I was blown away.
- josephg 6y ago
  I don't think its even that rare. As an example, there's a popular idle game called "ngu idle", full of complex overlapping and intertwined progression systems. Someone made this spreadsheet to help you optimize your play. Some of the worksheets in this have very carefully considered UI and complex data flows. Its totally inscrutable if you've never played the game, but its more complex and well crafted than many apps on my phone: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S1JXe3kZeqzxBOVXMo2-Db6iSrfeS42oTeBuVIarjmY/edit#gid=1665387656 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S1JXe3kZeqzxBOVXMo2-...
  - skydhash 6y ago
    I once seen one used in risk evaluation for line of credits
- trynton 6y ago
  @saberdancer: "When I saw this, I was blown away." I've seen something like that, that took a whole weekend to produce a report. I suppose it does the job, as long as the accountant doesn't mistake 30 for 0.03 (30%) in a formula.

enjeyw 6y ago

Building on this, when purist engineers trash Excel, I point out that Excel cell formulas are the only case of Functional Programming going truly mainstream.

ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.
- moftz 6y ago
  I use Excel in my data processing workflow. I'll grab a small subset of the data to play around with in excel to see what it is I actually need out of it. Then, I'll do all of the real processing in python along with matplotlib for any charts I need to produce. Excel could almost entirely handle my use cases but there is usually some bit manipulation I need to do because my data is usually telemetry encoded as ASCII. Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting. I could also just use MATLAB but I'm more used to using python.
  - slaymaker1907 6y ago
    Excel is exceptionally good at telling you what the shape of your data is. I love being able to just turn something into a table and then see the distinct values as a filter. Sure, SQL and most environments can tell you distinct values of a column and their counts, but they are much slower and more cumbersome to explore with. I often start out with broad filters then go through many more specific ones depending on what I see from the first filter.

scythe 6y ago

The painful thing about Excel is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's built on extensive UX research that tries to support the existing corporate culture and workflow. In so being it reinforces that norm, which generally encodes the assumption: the people handling this data don't understand how or want to write code. It's extremely difficult to build a spreadsheet that gives those people as much power as Excel does. This is frustrating for people working in an Excel shop who know how to code. Most of them realize their coworkers don't want to learn to code. They just wish their skills could be useful.

jjoske 6y ago

Excel is great until you need to fix/extend an app that is now integral to all company operations that was made 20 years ago by that guy in sales that was good at computers and has long left.

curiousllama 6y ago
Replace "Excel" with "Computers" and I agree
pbronez 6y ago
Sure, but that has nothing to do with Excel. You could say the same thing about basically any legacy application on any stack.
- sircastor 6y ago
  Yes,it doesn’t have anything to do with Excel, except Excel is there, has been there for 25 years and keeps getting updated and supported. I can’t speak to what gets maintained in Excel, but compared to some Win95 program, it’s in much better shape.
- ajnin 6y ago
  It does have something to do with it in the sense that it locks code in a proprietary format that does not allow code traceability and source co trol, and does not favor best practices like code comments and commit comments. That does make maintenance harder.
  - deleted 6y ago
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selfhoster11 6y ago
It just occurred to me that the situation is isomorphic to any runtime environment. I cannot imagine transplanting a shell script, C program, Java program (OK, maybe except for a Java program), Win32 app (OK, maybe that also), or a web-app from 20 years ago onto a modern version of the runtime and expect it to work without any major changes or fixes to account for the inevitable cases where the outside world simply decided that "we do not do things this way" any more. Cross-site scripting, password strength, political and timezone changes, many of those trip up applications too.

walrus01 6y ago

If you really want to hit your face on a desk, wait until you encounter a user who doesn't know how to tabulate or sum anything in Excel, and uses it as a big grid-based text editor, manually using a desk calculator to sum up columns, or perform various other formulas on some selection of cells. also, prepare for the user to suffer some sort of existential crisis or breakdown, possible tantrum after you show them how to do these tasks automatically with a simple excel formula.

hnrodey 6y ago
I'd almost prefer to see this behavior than the handful of people I've encountered who do this same exact manual math in ..... Word.
- bombcar 6y ago
  For many people they’re all just digital paper - and they work with it like they would with a notebook.
- mavhc 6y ago
  Why the OS doesn't allow you to select some text and perform system-wide actions on it is a mystery. Calculate, Upper/Lower/Sentence case, Search, Dictionary, etc etc
  - gmac 6y ago
    Like this? https://www.muo.com/tag/add-useful-options-mac-os-x-services-menu/ https://www.muo.com/tag/add-useful-options-mac-os-x-services...
    - mavhc 6y ago
      Seems so, https://www.gingerbeardman.com/services/ https://www.gingerbeardman.com/services/
clausok 6y ago
I encountered exactly this when my brother went to film school. The students would rotate roles and it was his turn to be the producer. One day I came home from work and he was having problems with his Excel-based budget sheet. I noticed that his row of sums at the bottom of one sheet had hard-coded values rather than formulas. Thinking he had inadvertently pasted over them, I told him, "Look, you killed your formulas." "What are formulas?", he asked. Turns out that he had been tallying up the columns with a calculator and then typing those totals into Excel.

arsome 6y ago

Yup, I write data analysis tooling but still one of the first things I get asked is "can I have all the raw data in a CSV?".

lanstin 6y ago
Never display data in a tabular format without sortable columns, and a link to the raw data as CSV/json, preferably CSV, and if possible a link to the SoR for the data source.

abandonliberty 6y ago

There's whole business that run on Excel. They shouldn't, but it's amazing.

Trasmatta 6y ago

This is literally what I spent my last two weekends doing. Not as something I wanted to sell, but for one of my own personal spreadsheet use cases. Thought I could build a web app to suit my needs better, but after some 30+ hours working on it, I'd rather just go back to the spreadsheet.

Pxtl 6y ago

My problem with Excel isn't the principle of spreadsheet software, but that it's bad spreadsheet software. It has a bad expression language and a bad API and bad type-safety and bad automatic type coercions and bad range behavior and bad copy-paste functionality... There are so many boneheaded things wrong with Excel that they can't fix because they must stay bug-compatible. So I keep dealing with text getting mangled into dates and iso8601 dates getting mangled into God knows what and papers getting examined and people finding out "oops your data got screwed up by some counterintuitive behavior of excel and your findings are all wrong".

ineedasername 6y ago
It's one of those things where it's bad, but it's the best we have, especially given that in some of the flaws you mention, they're pretty much copied by alternatives who want to be compatible with Excel.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> that they can't fix because they must stay bug-compatible They likely aren’t bugs. Some may have been. But they’re now expected behaviour. Moreover, by and large, they’re how non-programmers see the world.
toss1 6y ago
Do you know of one that does it better in terms of flexibility, data management, programmability, etc.?
Akronymus 6y ago
Not just automatic type coercion. But automatic DESTRUCTIVE type coercion.
netflixandkill 6y ago
Comically with their resources they could have put together a type-safe back end on sqllite with multiple available frontend APIs to gradually transfer users to Excel But Not Shitty, yet seem to have made no effort towards anything like that. I still see people getting date and numeric fields mangled by excel on analysis processes that take literal days to solve because it ends up recursing over all the cells multiple times, and yet even showing them a simple Python or whatever program that does the same thing in minutes, and the result is still put in excel, the next time they need something similar ... Here's another excel abomination. These aren't dumb people. They've been trained by Excel that the world is awful, slow, and error prone.

bernardv 6y ago

I second that. While it has plenty of flaws and is getting very dated, Excel has been a phenomenal tool in the land of the analysts and others who actually need to get work done and move on.

lanstin 6y ago
I had a big OS migration project, where we moved all the RHEL machines to Ubuntu. We had a big set of Python scripts that would go out and query a bunch of databases and logging system to get the current state of the migration each day, but we published the results as a spreadsheet that was emailed rather than some website. It worked very well to get people data they needed and to put it in a form where they could ask their own questions of the data without talking to anyone else. It worked better than I expected, having not used excel for decades.

boogies 6y ago

> if I could only use 1 piece of software forever, it’s probably Excel “And thus we see that people with prolonged exposure to nonfree software need special help.” *Commits sin against the Church of Emacs with proprietary DuckDuckGo JavaScript* Emacs has ~10 spreadsheet modes, including one for free-form calculation and one for reading Excel files (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet).

ineedasername 6y ago
Emacs also has a user interface that has a much steeper learning curve than Excel.
- boogies 6y ago
  That seems pretty irrelevant to the specific quote I was addressing, but in general it’s unfortunate there’s no tech-illiterate focused distro AFAIK, because it seems like CUA-mode would get you far enough to appeal to a lot of pretty mild power users (eg. there are stories of non-technical secretaries learning to program without realizing it by learning Emacs macros).
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    The specific quote exists as part of a broader context in this thread in which the accessibility of any proposed alternative to excel is relevant. Making it relevant to point out that while emacs might be a valid alternative for some, it is not for most users.
    - boogies 6y ago
      > The specific quote exists as part of a broader context in this thread in which the accessibility of any proposed alternative to excel is relevant. Right, which is why I tried to address the next claim: > while emacs might be a valid alternative for some, it is not for most users I think a distro like Spacemacs but with cua-mode / UX targeting Office users instead of with evil-mode / UX targeting vi users could make it fairly viable for many or even most users, it seems that it already is for many users, like the secretaries I mentioned in my other comment, who considered themselves non-programmers if not non-power users (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=emacs%20secretaries&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

matchagaucho 6y ago

It's the What-If and Goal-Seeking behaviors of Excel that CRUD app developers consistently overlook.

giantDinosaur 6y ago

As I always like commenting when I see these kinds of comments: many thanks for (in a general sense) providing consulting/freelancing/general small business work well into my future.

bsder 6y ago

> Then acceptance (and awe) - “Excel is UI, a DB, and business logic all wrapped in 1 thing that everyone already knows how to use.” We had a programming language that matched that description ... Visual Basic 6 -- and Microsoft killed it because it wasn't making them enough money.

pjmlp 6y ago
They did not kill anything, they brought them into VB.NET, and I can tell many VBA users are quite happy to transition into VB.NET, as I experienced in a couple of life sciences corporations. Having used VB back in the day, the only thing missing are a couple of people still not getting that VB.NET with Forms is just the same deal, even Me is available.
- bsder 6y ago
  Except that all the little controls and plugins DIDN'T transition to VB.NET--and they're what made VB6 useful to common people. And the hot code reload in VB.NET is nowhere near as useful as it was in VB6--and that was how common people debugged code. I can go on and on. VB.NET was not a useful replacement for VB6. I still know tons of businesses running VB6 code and, when they finally have to migrate, it won't be to VB.NET.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Not enough money to buy little controls from Telerik, ComponentOne, GrapeCity,....? Interactive .NET sessions have been working for several Visual Studio releases, at least all the way back to 2010. The only issue is the anti-VB.NET atittude from some VB circles.

emilsedgh 6y ago

I always hated excel. Then I met Airtable. Airtable is basically MS Access for the current age and it's absolutely amazing. When dealing with it, I realized what makes Airtable so wonderful and different from excel: It's typed! Each column has a type which allows airtable to build this easy to use featureset.

ziftface 6y ago

I think a crud app is great for "directing" the user through the common changes they will make to the data, like approving a document by clicking a button for example. But a simple tabular view of your data is really great too if you can get away with it. Sometimes it's not that useful, if for example the data is hundreds or thousands of columns wide. I think that's why something like airtable is great. It gives you the best of both worlds. All the data is backed by a simple spreadsheet, and it has an API so you can create the more custom UIs to help direct users with common tasks.

ineedasername 6y ago

I love excel, it's fantastic. I also hate excel, it causes me so many problems. Usually in the way of proliferating "shadow systems" of this sort: Them: "We need you to do X with our data." Me: "Okay, where do you see the data in the (enterprise ERP) system, I'll find the tables from there." Them: "We use Excel because the system doesn't have a place for this data." Me: "We upgraded 10 years ago. There's a place for it. How is office X getting the data they need from you?" Them: "Oh we just share an excel file each week and they add their own stuff to it. Here's 300 weekly files for the last 5 years. We really need the analysis in a few days." Me: ::tries to concat 300 excel files, discovers 50 variations on column arrangements, names, data types etc., tells department--:: "You aren't getting this in a few days. The good news is that you don't have to use Excel anymore because when I'm done, your data will be formatted & loaded into the ERP and all you'll have to do is put new stuff there too, and all analysis & reporting will be automated." Them: "But it's the full-time job of one of our staff to handled all of this stuff in Excel." Me: "Have you ever though that you needed more help in your department? Well, congratulations, you just got one 'new' full time employee." People at least then generally walk away happy, except for me as I stitch together 50 variations on 300 different excel files. That's a slight exaggeration though: Most of these offline shadow processes aren't quite that large, and staff turnover is usually fast enough that such a process doesn't age 10 years past its point of obsolescence.

thaeli 6y ago
Now we have Airtable and Smartsheet, where you can have a proliferation of undocumented shadow IT systems core to your business processes AND pay by the user every month for the privilege! That's progress, right?
- ineedasername 6y ago
  My general theory of shadow systems is that they're usually the product of either: 1) Poorly trained users that don't know how to use the system for their needs 2) A poorly chosen system (or system implementation) that doesn't fill the needs of the users. 2-b) This includes systems that technically do the thing users need it to do, but in such a bad/slow/sloppy way that no one wants to use it. I'm not sure which is more prevalent... I've had to say "Your system will do that for you" plenty of times, but I've also been on the other side creating shadow systems myself. One such was an ad-hoc data integration using python's splinter library to automate data download from a system w/o an API to a very kludgy "select .... from dual union" series of SQL statements to populate some of the data needed for a daily analysis. The ETL folks were already in integration hell on over-scoped projects, and also not accustomed or tooled up to run arbitrary python code-- especially any code they didn't write-- to power a process.

alexashka 6y ago

The real grief is tooling and infrastructure for software development itself. If it didn't cost a fortune to create and modify CRUD apps, Excel wouldn't be so popular. Why does Airtable, which is Excel in the cloud with a few trinkets cost so much and do so little, despite 100+ million having been poured into it? Because developing software is a nightmare every step of the way. Until that's addressed, we are stuck.

hackeredje 6y ago

SharePoint / Office is overlooked by the developers you write about here. Office/Excel clientside => SharePoint "Office Server" serverside => then write apps integrating with SharePoint. SharePoint is an application platform with Excel services on top of .Net. (so that multiple people at the same time can work on an Excel sheet via a web front-end) It is ment to make the step from local application to server application. It has auto import / workflows / api / taxonomy / search / etc ...

blntechie 6y ago

So much true. I have built many personal finance and analytical tools for my own use with Excel and Google Sheets in few mins and have extended their features as needed from there. I have been using some of these sheets for years and are better to my needs than buying an app or subscribing to a SaaS web product.

eru 6y ago

For most people in most companies, the choice is between hacking something together in Excel over the weekend that will mostly work (with a few bugs); or to give your project to the IT department and wait at least six months for them to fail anyway.

nine_k 6y ago

Spreadsheets are one of the original "bicycles for the mind". They empower users to do what users want to do, more efficiently. They have their downsides. But they allow a non-programmer express some logic and arithmetic in an interactive, iteratively built, visual reactive program. This is nearly unparalleled in the modern software landscape.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Excel ate my data four times in the past week. I prefer LibreOffice; I think it is much easier to control. Also I can tell LibreOffice not to eat my data and it listens to me.

yread 6y ago

Excel is the JavaScript of nonprogrammers.

globular-toast 6y ago

My main problem with Excel is it does many things but it's never the best tool for any job. If I could only use one piece of software forever it would be emacs. I find it sad that Excel would be considered in the same light. It makes me think of caged animals at zoos.

vagrantJin 6y ago

Excel spreadsheet is still underrated even in 2021. Regardless of the fact that governments and whole companies use it religiously.

ulucs 6y ago

Excel is an amazing piece of software if you are disciplined enough to use it well. Hell, I've even solved some Advent of Code problems on it: it's really powerful when you enable iterative calculation

hodgesrm 6y ago

> ...if I could only use 1 piece of software forever, it’s probably Excel. Google Sheets gives Excel a real run for its money. It's less powerful in many ways (example: getting data is more complicated) but makes up for it with the ability to collaborate and run multi-platform. Sheets is one of the more underrated products in the Google Apps portfolio. Disclaimer: I reached the awe stage on Excel many years ago.