24 ms·

Excel Never Dies

429 points by iamacyborg 6y ago

capybara_2020 6y ago
This is the most confusing article layout I have ever seen. The first part is almost an article in size and is an ad and then what seems to be another ad about some people. I was about to close this article assuming it was just spam with a click baity title.
- wmab 6y ago
  Agreed, it's a well researched piece published without any editing. Some good treats in there though if you can find them!
- mbreese 6y ago
  I'm fairly certain the original format is for an email newsletter. Once I figured that out, it all made more sense.
Tade0 6y ago
I've been having this nagging thought lately: what if web app UIs started off as in-browser spreadsheets and evolved from that? After all 90% of web apps are just forms with some validation and lists of things - a spreadsheet can do all that with greater flexibility as a bonus.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > just forms with some validation and lists of things - a spreadsheet can do all that with greater flexibility as a bonus. Speadsheets are great at a lot of things, but data validation doesn't tend to be one of them. In fact, I'd argue that's one of the main reasons to move off of spreadsheets: to make your data more structured. It may well be possible to create a spreadsheet-like UI that is good at these things though. And I can certainly see that being successful. It'd be difficult to tradeoff flexible vs constrained though.
  - DavidPeiffer 6y ago
    > Speadsheets are great at a lot of things, but data validation doesn't tend to be one of them. What limitations are you thinking of? I can go to Data -> Data Tools -> Data Validation and restrict to whole number, decimal, list, date, time, or string length. If that's insufficient, you can create a custom formula which has to evaluate to TRUE for the input to be considered valid. Regex isn't supported out of the box, but quite a number of string functions are, and there are readily available Regex user defined functions (VBA called via formala) available online. You can also customize the error alert that would be displayed to the user if they try to input something invalid. I think it'd work quite well for many MVP/single page web apps.
    - grey-area 6y ago
      The question is not what a sufficiently motivated competent person can do with the tools. It's what a sufficiently motivated incompetent person can do to your data with the tools. Infinite flexibility in the tooling means infinite ways to mess the database up in subtle and/or irredeemable ways, and a formula in a cell or even a regular expression are not great ways to tidy up real-world data, you often want autocorrect, autosuggest, defaults and friendly error messages for bad data rather than just ERROR IN CELL G91. When you reach that level of complexity it becomes much harder to build something useful with a spreadsheet-like tool alone. It is a really interesting idea though and for certain classes of data could really work well.
      - rvba 6y ago
        For many Excel projects you dont need data validation though.
- lopatin 6y ago
  Love the idea. An app that evolves from a spreadsheet is pretty brilliant, mate.
- jason2323 6y ago
  lol. One of my observations from my experience at startups : if you want to create a B2B SaaS company, convert a company’s spreadsheets into a webapp and voila!
- nsm 6y ago
  Airtable (airtable.com) is doing something like that. It’s less Excel and more a souped up relational database, so a slightly different angle where you surface the CRUD of a CRUD app to the user.
  - hermitcrab 6y ago
    I see Airtable as an online database with the ease of use of Excel. I created a system for a local charity using Airtable. I found it worked really well and the charity are delighted.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  I think Microsoft dropped the ball big-time by not making it easy to export an Excel workbook or Access project as a mobile-ready turnkey Web application. (It looks like it's possible to do, but not easy to do—from what I can tell, it either requires Office 365 or third-party software.) If that functionality existed and was easy to use, it could have been a very convenient option for businesses running their operations on Access database and looking to take advantage of mobile. I know Microsoft has InfoPath and Forms, but those aren't Access, so they're not going to be as popular.
- breck 6y ago
  I figured out how to do this years ago, even before I worked at Microsoft (and pitched it while there a number of times). It wasn't easy, and there was a lot to figure out, but the end result is starting to look pretty simple: https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://github.com/publicdomaincompany/copypaster https://github.com/publicdomaincompany/copypaster
  - Tade0 6y ago
    > In 2021 let's start making all web forms copy/pasteable. I love the premise - will give it a go.
    - breck 6y ago
      Great! If you take any notes on pain points trying to implement that pattern, would love to hear about them! My email is in profile
      - Tade0 6y ago
        Sure - I'll let you know.
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    The copypaster.publicdomaincompany.com URL in the project About box is broken.
    - breck 6y ago
      Fixed! Thank you for letting me know!
wmab 6y ago
This is a well researched article touching on some key points as to why Excel lives on. Interesting for me is the unbundling of Excel, and the birth of many B2B SaaS products. I'm not sure Excel was ever the right program to generate many of these products, and so it makes sense someone built a specific program to house it (product boards, CRMs, calendars all fall in this imo). Others however, absolutely, I'm not sure the long term value in some products that can simply be done in Excel - often when a startup goes after one of these verticals it's hard to create value for the user and the business, because by building a product you are by definition limiting the potential/power of the program by limiting what it can do. So you're asking someone to pay for something that is more limited than it's Excel-cousin, but might be simpler to use and look prettier. An example to me of this is financial modeling / flightpath type apps for businesses. Instead of paying for a bunch of saas, maybe a company should go back to hiring more Excel ninjas, ergo Excel Never Dies.
williamtwild 6y ago
>But there’s one software product born in 1985 Excel born in 85? Ok, but spreadsheets were around long before Excel
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  That's discussed in the article.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  And long before computers!
syntaxing 6y ago
Excel just works so well, almost too well. Wanna share some formulas? Excel. Finance calculator? Excel. A small (<2000 lines) database? Excel. Even with Python for Google Sheets, I sometimes want to rip my hair out when I use Google Sheets compared to Excel (though the Google Python is pretty useful for autogenerated sheets).
- scubbo 6y ago
  > I sometimes want to rip my hair out when I use Google Sheets compared to Excel Earnest, non-"gotcha" question - what is it about Google Sheets that you dislike or find irritating? I'm only an entry-level user for both, but I've found them of similar quality and functionality.
  - aaisola 6y ago
    Google sheets is useful for basic tasks. But as a power tool for complex models etc. it pales in comparison to excel. Not to mention that keyboard shortcuts are not the same which makes everything take significantly longer.
    - mediaman 6y ago
      Agreed. Google sheets feels great initially. Then you go to do that thing that you do in Excel, and...you look for it, and it seems like a basic omission, so you figure you just missed it, and Google around for it, and no, it's just not there. Even silly little things, like the fact that Sheets doesn't have an indent function, which makes it harder to neatly format financial data. I think the accepted workaround is to manually put spaces in front of every single row you need indented.
    - p00dles 6y ago
      ^1 for Excel keyboard shortcuts. One can customize the ribbon at the top for must used functions, which can make Excel such a fast tool to use compared to Google Sheets or even Excel for Mac (speaking as a Windows user). If I had a big Excel project to do, and I had the choice of 1/2 day on Excel (Windows) vs. a full day with Google Sheets or Excel (Mac), I would pick the 1/2 day with Excel (Windows).
Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
If Excel can handle >1m rows, all these "Big Data" analysis will just mean a bigger spreadsheet.
apples_oranges 6y ago
I've just read the chapters on VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 in "Founders at Work". It looks like VisiCalc made the Apple II take off back in the early days. And Lotus 1-2-3 addressed all the pain points people had with it a few years later on a more powerful platform (PC). Interesting stuff for sure. Why do I discover this book 12 years after it was published?
pmarreck 6y ago
I'm wondering if spreadsheets could be used as a tool to introduce programming to kids, since all the intermediate values are visible, and most programming is just data transformation. The fact that spreadsheets are effectively functional languages might mean that looping could be implemented as recursion with tail-call optimization... instead of only having cell references you could have references to keyboard or mouse input values, or URLs pulled from outside sources, or files read off the local storage... Instead of just having charting and graphing tools, you could have, say, a Turtlegraphics output box that would follow the instructions from some designated series of cells (which perhaps were themselves generated by formulas)
breck 6y ago
Spreadsheets and Programming Languages are about to procreate. The future is nigh. https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145
- asdff 6y ago
  They were procreating 45 years ago with S.
  - breck 6y ago
    Link to a screenshot that shows relevance?
morningtigerx 6y ago
Another thing Excel can't do well is when you need multiple people to be updating a single spreadsheet shared in OneDrive / SharePoint. If too many people have it open, OneDrive can fail to merge the changes, and you might have races and end up with data corruption.
ekianjo 6y ago
Excel Never Dies except when you feed it more than 1 million rows which is very common these days. Completely outdated for many uses.
- mbreese 6y ago
  But that's rare for the vast majority of users. How many people need to really calculate with 1 million rows of data? That may be common in some fields, but when you hit that level of data, you know that you should be using other tools. Excel hits a solid sweet spot for a large percentage of the computing public.
  - cyrialize 6y ago
    Agreed. People who use Excel daily knows it's limitations. They know that it can't work with huge amount of data, but they do know they could have their internal tech team upload the data into their database and send them a snippet of the data.
    - hermitcrab 6y ago
      Try telling that to the UK government: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
      - iamacyborg 6y ago
        Excuse me, our Tory government has a long history of competence. /s
- rustybelt 6y ago
  PowerPivot is one of the best ways to start exploring an unfamiliar dataset of 1 to 10 million records. Built into Excel.
zwieback 6y ago
I remember playing around with Multiplan and 1-2-3 in the 80s but the first time I saw Excel I knew I witnessed the birth of the greatest SW product of all times, ever. At the time engineers still spent a lot of time writing crappy one-off homebrew scientific apps and Excel really helped as a first platform for calculations you didn't want to do on your calculator. It's hard to imagine now but at the time PCs were command-line only and the early Excel versions, at least the one I saw, booted up a runtime version of Windows just to run Excel. I'm not sure whether they ported it over from MacOS to that special version or what but it was shocking to see.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Engineers can do better than Excel! See Blockpad (https://blockpad.net https://blockpad.net)
  - zwieback 6y ago
    Looks nice, I'll give it a whirl.
aarondia 6y ago
Excel, and more importantly, the spreadsheet is the best way to build intuition for a dataset, hands down. The alternatives, especially when it comes to Python and the default pandas output in a Jupyter Notebook are horrendous. Where Excel falls short, is data size limitations + auditability. Putting more than 1M rows of data into Excel is not possible, and once you get into the low 100K's, it becomes almost unbearable. And handing off an Excel workbooks to a colleague is handing them hours of cell dependency tracing. On the other hand, data size + auditability are the super powers of Python data analysis. I've been building a Python package, Mito (https://trymito.io/ https://trymito.io/), its an interactive spreadsheet that automatically converts your spreadsheet analysis to the equivalent pandas code. You can write spreadsheet formulas, merge datasets, create pivot tables, etc. And because its implemented in Python, you can manipulate datasets with 10M rows of data with no problem. Our goal is to bring the intuitiveness of Excel data manipulation to Pandas.
- tryitnow 6y ago
  What's the pricing model? There's a lot of potential here.
  - aarondia 6y ago
    We're still exploring the business model to support the project. Right now, Mito is free to trial, and we're experimenting with a subscription plan somewhere in the range of $10 per month. I'd say about half of our users are using it for free and half of them are on some sort of subscription. We're also considering open sourcing the tool, and doing the classic Enterprise Sales / consulting / other value add services on top. If you have ideas about which direction to take it, would love to hear!
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  What non-spreadsheet programming languages/environments do you think work better than Python/Jupiter? I’ve been fairly happy with the default Matlab IDE personally. Visibility and representation of data has the straightforwardness of a spreadsheet. But surely there must be others?
Buttons840 6y ago
I've been thinking about trying to create my own open source spreadsheet. I can't decide if they're simple or complicated. The simple view is that all you need is: (1) One main UI component, "the cell" (2) a domain specific formula / programming language (3) the underlying reactive system that tracks cell dependencies and updates them, etc.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  I think it depends on what you intend for it to be used for. The reductionist view of it is that it's a workspace for crunching numbers. But in practice, Excel is sometimes used like a frontend for a database engine, with sometimes heavy scripting to integrate into software processes and workflows. I think Excel's ability to stretch beyond what anybody would still reasonably consider the scope of "spreadsheet software" is why Excel is as entrenched as it is. I don't think many programmers see it as a safe or ideal way of handling the kinds of workloads that people use it for, but I think we all acknowledge its unmatched ability to let non-programmers automate data crunching.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Well, you can """Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#""": http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/# http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/# Posted here but didn't get traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24980325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24980325
hypermachine 6y ago
Not just Excel, the integrated scripting environment around it too. A lot of the heavy lifting in complex setups is done by custom VBA scripts.
- onychomys 6y ago
  Someday they'll update the VBA IDE to have some super basic features (like autoformatting or text highlighting or whatever). That'll be so great.
  - hypermachine 6y ago
    Sign up for our mailing list (link in profile), that's what we are building (and more including support for collab editing, version control, and cloud native deployments).
  - asdff 6y ago
    Someday accountants and business people everywhere will bite the bullet and spend the 5 hours or so it takes to get a working knowledge of R and finally step into the first world of programming languages.
tgb 6y ago
I hadn't used Excel in years and now that I do, there's some things about it that drive me nuts: - It forgets what you've copied to clipboard. Copy something. Insert another row so that there's space for it. Paste. Nothing happens. Huh? It lost my copy. It does this for a large number of operations and it drives me crazy. I've never seen any other program do this. - You can't open two spreadsheets of the same name. This is because spreadsheet formulas can refer to cells in other tables. But I don't use that feature - can't I just open the second spreadsheet with a warning that this feature won't apply to it? - (This one applies to too many pieces of Microsoft technology.) You can't use common keyboard shortcuts properly. Ctrl-backspace deletes a word in any useful text box. Not in formula editing in excel. And ctrl+delete deletes the rest of the line instead of just the next word. Why?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  The one that drives me insane is that while editing a cell formula, that using the arrow keys move cells (and update [read: wreck]) the formula rather than moving the cursor within the formula you're editing.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Just hit F2 while editing a formula to toggle between Edit and Enter modes, one of which will behave as you expect. The other mode, which you hate, is very useful when you want to add references to other cells into your formula
    - jacurtis 6y ago
      Yes, the edit mode (using arrows to create formulas) is actually something I really find convenient. To me it is a feature, not a bug. But yeah, F2 is fairly easy to use once you get used to it. Its like using VIM, the shortcuts seem annoying to the uninitiated, but once you get understand how everything works, the power can really speed things up and you appreciate it.
    - ska 6y ago
      > is very useful when you want to add references to other cells into your formula I really wish the default is the other way around. When I do want to add other cells, more than half the time there is a better way than using arrow keys.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Startups that began as a Craigslist category: https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/craigslist.jpg https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20... Now someone make that for web apps that began as an excel spreadsheet. Or even better, ML projects that should have stayed a simple spreadsheet.
- guessbest 6y ago
  If anyone wants to gather ideas on an app idea, they would be well served by running the following query in their favorite search engine : "<app idea> xlsx"
monroewalker 6y ago
Do others here still recommend using Excel/Google Sheets despite having programming knowledge, or are there more powerful tools available (eg. Airtable) which might be less accessible to people without tech backgrounds? If spreadsheets are still the way to go, any recommended resources on learning some best practices with them? I never got into spreadsheets because it seemed unnecessary after learning how to program, but I end up missing out on applications that might work in excel but which I don't care enough about to hand-write.
- Arainach 6y ago
  Excel is incredibly useful for all sorts of quick data crunching. My preferred introduction to intermediate-level spreadsheet usage is Joel Spoelsky’s “You Suck at Excel” https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c
- aksss 6y ago
  Absolutely. Excel is a workhorse. It would be like asking if, since I got my bulldozer, do I ever still use a shovel. Yes. All the time. It has massive casual utility on a day-to-day basis. Add to that a lot of your business partners communicate information in Excel. When I was a young programmer I intentionally developed good excel skills because it was the idiom my customers knew. I felt like they would think less of me if I wasn’t competent on such a basic tool of business. And I think that instinct was correct. I look at someone in the corporate world who’s unable to sling a good spreadsheet as developmentally disabled. Like if you walked in saying you don’t know how to use a word processor. Spreadsheets are a way of exchanging data between humans in the same that word processors facilitate this, but for structured data sets. Time spent learning basic Excel functions (math stuff and xlookup for example) and how to build pivot tables will pay you dividends over the years.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Yes, I absolutely still recommend Excel/Sheets. It highly depends on what work you need to do, but in general I use Excel for quick and dirty data crunching where the number of rows isn't that big (<100,000) and I don't expect to need to repeat the analysis often. For example, as a cyber security analyst, one-off sifting through some CSV format logs. Being able to do some basic transforms on the data with the benefit of real-time visualization is nice.
fermienrico 6y ago
Native Windows XP + Excel was badass. No new features were needed. No one asked for anything else. It was feature complete. Have you tried running an older version of Excel (2007 era) even in a VM? It is lightning fast. No cell-movement animations and this unibar crap at the top, saving a file is 2 clicks away unlike the newer version going off to the cloud, making requests and having to back out to save locally. WTF. Excel is an amazing app. UI engineers and PMs at Microsoft are trying to kill it.
- aksss 6y ago
  That save as... workflow is most annoying. Adobe does that too. In almost every scenario there’s a sync tool to take care of cloud storage. The web is great, but the web is slow and brittle. The cloud save is best when it’s an asynchronous background task.
tgbugs 6y ago
In academic data management I have identified what I suspect is a common progression over the course of a career. Obliviousness to the problem. Rage at the inadequacy. Search for alternatives. Realization that you do not have the resources to build and maintain something else, much less train all the labs to use it. Further realization that it is harder to explain how to set the right file encoding and the fact that a csv file is not a colon separated file to hundreds of labs than to just accept xlsx. Acceptance that Excel is a more reasonable user interface for data deposition than anything you could come up with. It is sad, but at the end of the day, however bad Excel is for life sciences data (to the point where standards bodies renamed genes due to autoformat issues!?), it ends up being better when usability and bad data edge cases are considered. Defaults matter for non-technical users, and even asking them to change the format they save in to csv is likely to cause issues because it is one more manual step that can go wrong, or there is some locale nonsense that will cause something to break etc.
sega_sai 6y ago
As a person who mostly does (large) data analysis and mostly uses python, I've recently thought of when I prefer to use spreadsheets vs python and my (personal) conclusion was to use spreadsheets, when my data can fit into one screen. In that case with excel you directly see all your data, you can change inputs and see output change in real time. But if the amount of data is larger than that, I am better off with dedicated calculations (in say python) and plots summarizing the data.
SeanLuke 6y ago
> Excel, and more importantly, the spreadsheet is the best way to build intuition for a dataset, hands down. Excel is a low-dimensional, untyped, flat database. I couldn't think of something worse. It has been successful only because its design mimicked traditional accounting books. But for more complex datasets, ugh. Back in NeXTSTEP days there was Lotus Improv (and later Lighthouse Design Quantrix). It permitted high dimensions, true names for rows, columns, hypercolumns, cells, and so on, and sophisticated modeling capabilities. It was, clean, required none of the ugly bug-filled hacks you see in Excel, and very easy to get your head wrapped around. Of course it's dead now.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > It permitted high dimensions, true names for rows, columns, hypercolumns, cells, and so on, and sophisticated modeling capabilities. It was, clean, required none of the ugly bug-filled hacks you see in Excel, and very easy to get your head wrapped around. Of course it's dead now. Do named ranges in Excel not match some of what you're after here?
  - SeanLuke 6y ago
    A little bit. But it's hard to explain just how advanced Improv was (and still is).
intrasight 6y ago
Me and spreadsheets go way back. My first job was hacking Lotus 1-2-3 at Kodak as a summer intern in 1985. I consider it my first programming job. A year later, I got interested in neural networks, and built back-propogation models in Excel on the mac. Yes very SLOW but still a great way to learn. As side project ten years back was to leverage Excel's native web query (IQY) mechanism to build a profitable SaaS company just based upon letting users get data into Excel from various 3rd party social media and analytics platforms. Now I work in big oil and our team basically turns Excel models that users create into scalable data warehouse apps. Even after years working with Excel, I still consider myself a journeyman.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Using excel for learning NN. Multi input on a node would be a bit wonky (but doable) and layers could just be sheets in the workbook. It even already has a bunch of nice built in tools to import/export data. That is one of those 'why did I not think of that' things!
coliveira 6y ago
One of the main excel advantages come from the fact that the app presents useful features and never changed their interface. Unlike modern software that try to change their workflow to "improve" it, excel has kept the same stable interface for decades. This allows people to create workflows built on the software, not fighting it. Excel users know that the interface they employ will be stable for another 20 years, or even more. Very few applications can say this, the other ones I know of including Vim and Emacs.
- warmwaffles 6y ago
  When they updated the interface from office 2003 to fit with the new hot rounded UI was a tragedy.
  - asdff 6y ago
    No one held a gun to your head and told you to uninstall perfectly good office 2003
    - warmwaffles 6y ago
      Except when it was forced on us by our IT department.
      - chungy 6y ago
        And the file format was entirely replaced with XLSX. Yes, there were plugins to support XLSX (and even ODS) in Excel 2003, but it wasn't well-known.
- charwalker 6y ago
  Yeah, they tried adding a Ribbon once in 2007 and it blew up so much they left it in but barely changed it since.
- asdff 6y ago
  R would like a word. 45 years of workflows and still going.
hacker20210308 6y ago
I have a soft spot for Excel. It inspired me to do this 4 (almost 5 now) years ago in JavaScript. The prototype was written to prove a DOM renderer could handle trillion cell datasets having a high on screen cell density running at 60fps. Bonus: Watch to the end of the video to see video running in a cell. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-eDS4OZpk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-eDS4OZpk
omega3 6y ago
I don't see any software produced today approaching the level of user-centric productivity and speed one can get out of (keyboard only) Excel. Is software like this just not being produced now?
- asdff 6y ago
  It totally is. R is even faster and more productive than Excel.
- jerjerjer 6y ago
  Hilariously, Access is another Microsoft product which also helps with user-centric productivity. Many hate it but it sure is an easy way to build an entire data entry/CRUD app without any programming knowledge.
rob74 6y ago
...but where Excel really shines and enhances productivity is in combination with that other tool we all love and will never give up, email. Someone emails you (and 10 other persons) some data in an Excel sheet, you (and unbeknownst to you, 2 other persons) update the sheet with some new data and reply to the email, and after a few iterations nobody knows anymore how many versions of the document are in circulation and which one is the most up-to-date. Oh, joy!
- aksss 6y ago
  Sounds like a training issue - Excel has a much better tool available now. Click the “Share” button in upper-right corner and now you’re all working on same doc and have concurrent editing capability.
adamredwoods 6y ago
Excel is horrible to program in. Example: I needed to import a bunch of URLs, then pull the query params out and auto-create a SQL query based on those. I was able to do it, but when I entered the Visual Basic editor, it was a whole new word of UI hurt.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  That sounds like probably the sort of thing that shouldn't be done in Excel though.
  - adamredwoods 6y ago
    I like to push software around, but yes, there are better ways to do this.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Excel is horrible to program in. VBA, and the built-in DE for it, isn't great, but you can program Excel other ways (Office Add-In, xlwings, etc.)
ianhorn 6y ago
People are all talking about how it's useful for quick stuff with datasets, but it goes far beyond that. It's useful for quick anything you might want a small database for. Imagination is the limit. For example, if any of you play D&D online, you might be familiar with dndbeyond's character sheets. They're a fantastic way to onboard new players who might not have the inclination to spend hours with the rule books before they even start playing. It does all the calculations for you and gives you some buttons like "roll athletics" and doesn't let you add more spells than your character can have with their stats. I recently persuaded some friends to give FATE a try and built analogous push-button character sheets with google sheets [0]. It was quick and simple. With conditional formatting, you highlight bad states (rules say you can't have more of X than Y!). With the script editor, you can add full on buttons for dice rolls and other state changes with whatever logic you want (anything you can code up!). Checkboxes are obvious but super useful. And the transparency of the calculations is helpful for teaching people the system (this stat is "min(A4, B1+C5)"). Without google sheets, it would be a serious endeavor to build a stateful, database backed, live collaborative GUI that can be added to and customized on the fly by my users. With google sheets, it was a quick fun afternoon hack. Excel/google sheets is an amazing piece of technology. [0] Screenshot of the "app": https://raw.githubusercontent.com/imh/public_images/main/Screen%20Shot%202021-03-08%20at%209.37.17%20AM.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/imh/public_images/main/Scr...
- asdff 6y ago
  I find with excel it takes just as much time to set up a spreadsheet to do what I want as it takes for me to do the same in R, usually a lot more time with Excel. Both pieces of software have learning curves, just to me R is the better tool for the job for working with tabular data. Excel forces you to hardcode your fomulas and ultimately adds a lot of cruft and time wasted, compared to R which is much more modular. That "min(A4, B1+C5)" is liable to break if your spreadsheet changes. R functions on the other hand are pretty well documented, and you could do anything you want in R after following a tutorial for a couple hours. Instead of having to hard code a position, you can refer to it relatively or by some unique identifier, so your calculations still work no matter how your underlying spreadsheet changes or is shuffled around (and familiar formulae like sum and min and max are there by the same names). It's way easier to do statistical tests and plot data consistently in R as well. Oh, and you can export to .csv or .xlsx from R if you'd like of course.
chrisgd 6y ago
It is used as a graphics output of those financial models as well. Bankers, both commercial and investment, use it to copy and paste into PowerPoint presentations that form the basis of billion dollar transactions everyday.
hermitcrab 6y ago
I have built 3 commercial products: a seating planner, a visual planner and a data transformation tool. I'm confident that Excel is the main competitor for all 3.
hermitcrab 6y ago
If anyone is interested in reading about Excel related disasters then I recommend Matt Parker's intersting and entertaining 'Humble Pi' book.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Like a lot of Linux zealots who ran Linux everywhere for 20 years, I hated most things associated with legacy Microsoft, because of EEE, and what they did through SCO. However, I had to relax my attitude about 10 years ago, when I realized that I owed my entire career to Excel. I've mostly made a living by being an engineer who creates proper, focused software tools for other engineers to use, and almost every program I've written is because there was a crappy Excel tool trying to cope with the problem, and falling over due to size and unshareability. That's when I write a website in Rails, or a WinForms .NET application, keep adding features until users stop asking for fixes, then move on to the next one. Of course, there's been ebb-and-flow in my career, but the bulk of it has been driven by the fact that Excel is so seductive, and easy to start something useful. Then, like a lot of Microsoft products, leaves you hanging when it's time to get serious. So, credit where it's due. Whatever you can say about it's shortcomings, they've been my bread and butter for 27 years, and counting.
- F_J_H 6y ago
  >> "Then, like a lot of Microsoft products, leaves you hanging when it's time to get serious." This is like a moving company saying their small moving vans "left them hanging" once they outgrew them and started doing national vs. local moves. A tool that proves useful at one stage is not useless because it can't be as useful at ALL stages. The great thing about Excel as it enables you to do the one thing that kills most start-ups, projects, etc., which is simple to start.
  - aksss 6y ago
    > the one thing that kills most start-ups I thought you were going to say taxes and bookkeeping. :D
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    I mean... that's kind of exactly what underlies my whole comment.
xupybd 6y ago
The company I work for has their CAM manufacturing calculations run through excel. The non technical director has calculated every possible route line required for our CNC process. This is something that would be very hard to do in a conventional programming language. He did it with no coding background and it's one of the most maintainable pieces of software in the business. It's all laid out in front of you. If they need a diagram to explain something, it's there inline. There are no unreadable long nested if statements. He didn't even know you could nest them. It is truly amazing, I've not seen anything like it. I've seen plenty of train wrecks where people try to run other parts of the business through excel.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  The world would be shocked to know how many hedge funds and mutual funds are managed in excel workbooks. I worked with one RIA who (correctly, IMO) listed "excel" as a systemic risk to their business. If excel ceased to exist tomorrow they (and much of Wall Street) would be in a world of trouble.
beefield 6y ago
I'd have a couple of development proposals for excel: 1. Remove the ability to save workbooks. This would keep the excel in organisations where it excels (pun intended), namely quick & dirty sketches and visualizations. If you need something twice, it is likely you need that more than twice and you should be using something else. 2. If not that, give me a worksheet type that forces each cell in a column to have same formula or data type. and just a sheet that you can refer to as any other sheet, not a powerwhantnotthingy. 3. Version control. Seriously, Microsoft, what on earth are you paying your excel developers for if not this?
- aarondia 6y ago
  I totally agree that this makes sense for certain types of Excel work -- the data analysis, report generating workflows. You can see my comment above about how we're addressing some of these issues with Mito. However, not sure that these three points hold for the type of financial modelling work that is done in Excel today. There isn't a great unbundling of Excel for the LBO, etc world (yet), so the inability to save or have columns with multiple data types/formulas seems quite limiting for that world.
  - beefield 6y ago
    I was thinking that there were two types of worksheets. the current, freeform sheets, and in addition to that a new type that would enforce data integrity over columns. That would make it much safer to have worksheets for structured data and freeform sheets for visualizing etc separate. (the first one was admittedly a bit tongue in cheek.)
- aksss 6y ago
  > 3. version control I think this is provided through either OneDrive/SharePoint or some other offboard solution. Do you really want Excel to have a native version control system? Seems like other solutions would always do this better.
  - beefield 6y ago
    Does onedrive/sharepoint or some other offboard solution show diffs between versions and have merge capabilities? (I have not been using excel as anything but a scratchpad in years, so I may have missed some cool new features)
jedjdjdjaj 6y ago
Excel is shit.
makach 6y ago
Except for when it plunges itselfs into the fiery pits of Mordor
moonbug 6y ago
not only will it never die, it's more important and has greater impact than all your hipster languages ever will.
moonbug 6y ago
Excel is programming. fight me.
pjbster 6y ago
I will never trust Excel for manipulating any real world data. Period. Excel only keeps the first 15 digits of any number you give it [0]. If you want to keep the full number, you have to store it as text instead. And then you can't perform calculations with it without converting back to a number and losing fidelity. The two most prevalent data types in business are numbers and dates. It's incredible that Excel is rubbish at dealing with both and yet the world thinks it's the gold standard for doing "business-y stuff" in. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/last-digits-changed-to-zeros https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/l...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nly 6y ago
  Presumably the 15 digits thing is because Excel stored numbers as IEEE binary64 doubles? It's amusing because real world JSON has exactly the same contraint, and that's arguably the most common data exchange format in the world now.
- rvba 6y ago
  What calculations do you make with "businessy" stuff that you need more than 15 digits of accuracy?
  - pjbster 6y ago
    Financial data migration. Big numbers down to many decimal places. I lost days trying to locate a non-existent problem due to this "feature". Not to mention a stakeholder breathing down my neck.
    - rvba 6y ago
      What kind of finance numbers do you keep, that you need 15 digits of accuracy. Exchange rates are usually 4 digits. So where does the other 11 go and why do you need it? For example, this 0,00000000001 of a dollar?
Balgair 6y ago
Aside: Joel Spolsky's now famous talk about Excel is a must watch for anyone that uses Excel but hasn't been arsed to actually take a course in it. Even for Excel haters out there, the talk is very much worth your time today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
terryf 6y ago
Definitely it will never die. You know you've won when there's a special interest group (with a yearly conference!) focused on risks the software is creating http://www.eusprig.org/ http://www.eusprig.org/
_pdp_ 6y ago
Excel is great no doubt but everyone forgets that it is solving only some types of problems - mostly data input, fomula-based calculations, etc. It is completely unfit for purpose for others.
GnarfGnarf 6y ago
I've seen spreadsheets with horribly complex, incomprehensible algorithms, that are so much easier and simpler to write in C++ or Python or any programming language. BTW XLWare makes a great library LibXL to create genuine .XLSX files from a program.
fredfoobar 6y ago
OT, but does anyone remember the easter egg in excel that literally opened up a flight sim?
tonymet 6y ago
I would love an entire OS (like ChromeOS) & protocol around Excel/spreadsheet. you log in, and everything on your desktop is a spreadsheet : contacts, calendars, email/messaging, forms. Like a primitive hypercard with only table view.
hateful 6y ago
Over the years, the wife and I tried numerous shared calendars - but nothing has yet topped the one I made fairly manually in Google Sheets. I just copy a few rows down every once in a while and we keep it going. Color coded, Emoji for different types of events, each week is collapsible and shows just the emoji for that day. Never happier. Every other calendar's interface and customization seemed like a limitation rather than a feature.
submeta 6y ago
Is there a way to manipulate Excel cells from within Python/Pandas? Last time I checked I had a hard time to write to an existing Excel file (= prevent overwriting it). Would love to do the complex calculations in Python instead of using VBA.
- silvershell 6y ago
  I think XLwings (https://www.xlwings.org https://www.xlwings.org) can do some of that.
  - submeta 6y ago
    This looks awesome! Thank you.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  You might be interested in Pyspread: https://pyspread.gitlab.io/ https://pyspread.gitlab.io/
- iuqiddis 6y ago
  I've used openpyxl[1] to access excel cells directly while using python [1] https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
jplr8922 6y ago
I used to think that I hated excel, and that as a DataScientist-TradingDeskAnalyst, python or R would save the world. Now I realize that my hatred for Excel has nothing to do with the software itself, but the way it is used for political motives. If your VP or Top Trader or Boss choose to keep everying on 'his' excel, its not for sofwtare quality. Its for control. You can run away with your excel-data-model on a USB stick. Not so true for SaaS. You can keep it on your PC, and not share it with others. You can put passwords without IT knowing about it. Excel = Shadow IT department with hidden political goals.
haolez 6y ago
Excel is like Emacs for non-programmers. It's a sandboxing tool for your imagination to go wild.
fersarr 6y ago
I'm also one of the people trying to build a more convenient way to do these kind of things: https://hupreter.com https://hupreter.com
mwcremer 6y ago
My wife uses Excel almost exclusively as a text layout tool. To the extent that while building an event plan in Excel she asked me, “What is 29 + 17?”
theropost 6y ago
We started with a simple excel tool, that has morphed into a visual pay system that talks to the database through SQL queries - it impresses me everyday how much this excel file does, and the 2000 users that use it daily say the same thing
- smitty1e 6y ago
  Excel is the Lowest Common Denominator of UX. You can show them an .xlsx, and there is no fear, and thus some chance of user acceptance. There is enough structure that you can process it, and enough programmability to get by. The format is broadly accessible across platforms. It's not perfect, but it's a great going-in position.
toyg 6y ago
> Excel may be the most influential software ever built I'd argue that award should go to the real pioneers of spreadsheet applications: LANpar, VisiCalc, and to an extent Lotus 1-2-3 and LoGisTiX. What has really stood the test of time is the concept of spreadsheets, not anything specific to Excel. Excel didn't do anything particularly revolutionary, it didn't set out to "influence" anything. It just competed on feature-matching and cut-throat commercial practices until all the others had died. A great achievement for sure, but praising that over VisiCalc and Lotus is a bit like praising Toyota over Henry Ford when it comes to automobile production chains.
- rbobby 6y ago
  There was a really useful spreadsheet application for DEC's RSTS/E... named "calc" maybe? The innovative part of it was a cell formula included an output directive. So the normal excel formula in cell b1 of "=sum(a1..a26)" has it's output written to b1. But with calc you could in cell b1 put "b2=sum(a1..a26)" and the result would be written to b2. This became super powerful when dealing with ranges. You could have 1 formula that that calculate the row-wise total for each row... and it would be in 1 cell, so for example "$1..$10=sum($1..$9)" (forgive me I can't recall the addressing specifics for relative/fixed/named ranges). It was pretty amazing at the time.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  Well, the linked article points out that Excel's engineers came up with a new, better, and much faster way of doing recalculation than Visicalc and 1-2-3 had at that point -- and it was arguably the first spreadsheet program built for the GUI era. Both of those things were new features, and they really mattered. Excel didn't win just based on marketing alone.
  - fsckboy 6y ago
    the same people who designed and built Microsoft Multiplan (a dud if there ever was one) also went on to create Excel, an odyssey that started in 1983, and that version was created for an early version of Windows that didn't get any traction, and then Excel was rebuilt for the Mac, so that's v2 (3 if you count Multiplan), and then when recreated again it finally took off after many years with the success of Microsoft Windows 3.0 starting in 1990. Excel only won from the years of longevity provided by a deep pockets company with a vested interest in extending its monopoly, with a little help from Lotus who really dropped the ball on the switchover to GUIs
zelphirkalt 6y ago
This probably has been said before and relates to spreadsheets in general, instead of only to Excel: Well written spreadsheets, if they have need for formulas, can be seen as examples for functional programming, where a cell takes input from specified other cells and the result is in the cell itself, not modifying its arguments, so that it stays the true result at any point in time. This has some advantages and can give a spreadsheet a set of advantages over imperatively written programs processing the same data. Additionally spreadsheets allow for a very short feedback cycle. Of course there are downsides to it as well.
mathgladiator 6y ago
I have found Excel deeply awesome to use, and I am building a reactive programming language inspired by the concepts (for board games!). The key is that a single script defines the entire workbook's logic, then data sits externally within a giant JSON object. I'm trying to find a balance between the engineering concepts (source control, data versioning, audit logs) and productivity (how easy is the language and related tools). I'm currently working on a editor for board games where I get playful with how to build UIs for the language. It's fun, but I'm wondering if I am re-inventing hypercard. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-being-lazy-is-key http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-being-lazy-is-key One mental model is that the entire document is just an Excel sheet that you can send messages to and learn of updates reactively. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/reference-reactive-formulas http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/reference-reactive-formulas
cutler 6y ago
One minute we're effusing about Excel's magical powers as if databases and programming languages were an afterthought, the next we're all over Excel's flaws after yet another financial company is caught with its trousers down for relying on Excel for too much of its data infra. Excel is just a spreadsheet already.
xyzelement 6y ago
Excel is amazing for rapid data analysis and modeling, the flexibility it provides is exceptional when you're working alone and are trying to do one thing, fast. It becomes a pain when you're trying to use it to enforce workflows, across multiple people. The problem is that it works "well enough" that building a proper data model/system to replace the spreadsheet workflow is not going to get prioritized because it already sort of works and there are likely bigger problem areas in the org. It's a pretty classic problem where something enables you to solve a problem fast and well enough as to often preclude an excellent solution. On the flip side, if something is new/evolving and is handled in excel, it's a mistake to try to tighten it up in an application right away because you are going to end up evolving the app at a cost whereas evolving the spreadsheet would have been nearly free.
- codesnik 6y ago
  excel is a grandiose waste of human time, exactly because of that "well enough" feature set.
codesnik 6y ago
Spreadsheets, as they incarnated in Excel are akin to running old style no-named-subroutines, only-two-chars-per-variable-name, goto-line-number BASIC but on modern hardware. Ideas that could potentially grow into something safe and powerful cannot grow now because of market dominance of that outdated monster. And I keep hearing the same arguments, like "it can be used without knowing how to program" - but have you actually seen those formulas they enter? How exactly it differs in complexity from, say, SQL? At least in SQL you'll have sanely named columns and can actually see logic, reading it a month later. Mixing datasets and freeform reports in the same sheets is a design mistake. Having auto-conversion for data is a design mistake. Not having enforced row/column sets instead of just typing any formula anywere is a design mistake. All that leads to millions of wasted hours of human life just looking closely on rows and rows of numbers with squinted eyes, trying to figure where accidental keystroke had broken your data. I really liked how MacOS Numbers approached spreadsheets, before they were somewhat butchered for ipads and excel compatibility: spreadsheets were not "infinite", separating concept of tables from concept of pages; column and row headers automatically used as names in formulas instead of undescriptive A1:B2 format, making them actually readable. Unfortunately it was also slow as hell. Airtable is a good direction for data entry purposes by multiple people, unfortunately it's no good for even medium sized tables, and exporting is limited.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Tables are, of course, an excellent way of organizing data. Now add in the easy point and click UI and simple formulas to get you hooked, and soon you find yourself deep in VLOOKUPS and macros with no way back. Excel eases you into data organisation and manipulation. Many tools are better for any given task, but Excel excels at generalising.
  - SavantIdiot 6y ago
    I taught an engineer how to do 2D iterative scenarios with TABLE(), and his XLS files began taking 30+ minutes to open. Every XLS ended with "-DANGERTABLES.xls" to remind us not to accidentally click it and kill our machines. [For those who don't know, it's basically a way to reduce a massively interconnected spreadsheet (dozens of sheets) as f(x,y)=z, and then make hundreds of tables built with that function. Insanely powerful, but causes spreadsheets to grind to halt every time you touch a cell (unless you turn off auto computation).]
doggydogs94 6y ago
Most important keystroke when working on a spreadsheet, cntl-z, Undo.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Makes its closed-source storage format all the more a travesty. All office file formats have stopped document and information processing and search way harder, and have been a lock-in pox on the world for, what, 3 decades now?
SavantIdiot 6y ago
Excel is like the yellow engineering pads: essential for an engineer. I tried to use Google Sheets, but nothing matches the speed of popping open excel, and the functionality (still can't do 2D TABLE solvers in Sheets AFAIK). I know Sheets can work offline, too, but it is sluggish compared to native Excel. I had issues for years with Excel on Mac doing wonky things, but with the latest non Office365 version, they've fix a lot of issues (mostly rendering). I got into JMP but only because my employer paid for it (it's like $15k i think), but while it is powerful stats engine, it lacks the sheer imaginative flexibility of a spreadsheet. There really aren't many other choices, are there? I mean, prior to excel, lotus123 was de-facto, and the last time I tried StarOffice it hurt my soul.
shimonabi 6y ago
I went to live in a German speaking country for a few years and the most astounding and unsettling thing I learned the whole time there was that function names in Excel are also translated to German. For example, you need to use SUMME instead of SUM.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  At one point even VBA was localised...
leibnitz27 6y ago
Excel never dies, but BOY does it get worse with each iteration. It often feels to me that in the last several releases all that's been done is apply more and more lipstick to a pig that's already 90% lipstick. I recently fired up excel 2003 on a whim (yep, I'm that much of a party animal.) MY GOD. It was blazingly fast. Beautiful. Usable. (If you ignore the fact that the one good change in the last 2 decades is the XLOPER12, allowing >255 rows and lots of columns). (X) (X) Yes, Lambda looks interesting, but HOF aren't really necessary in basic sheets, I'd rather they got it usable first.
theshrike79 6y ago
My Master's Thesis was to develop an automated testing platform for TETRA phones[1]. It was programmed with VBA and ran on top of Excel. The UI was a sheet of buttons and the results were outputted to a tab on the same sheet. I even added a cheapo webcam to it, which would record the phone display during tests and save the .avi file if the test failed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Just wrote a complex calculation for my wife's work in Anthropology, regarding translating a Canadian grid to gps coordinates. In Excel. Because it was there, and it can encapsulate a complex expression and present it as a field and resulting value. So no, even if Excel died we'd need something much like it the next day.
mcv 6y ago
At my current job, I've really come to hate Excel. Business is completely addicted to it. Despite Data Quality being an explicit concern that we're supposed to work on, they love maintaining their hand-typed data in Excel sheets, referring to other data with hand-typed names instead of proper foreign keys, and then I'm supposed to load and connect all that crap. And nobody is using it for actual calculations, which is what spreadsheets are for. I would really, really like a flexible database with an Excel-like front-end and easily-definable columns that make use of foreign keys, so we can actually maintain some data quality here. And what I'm looking for sounds so obvious that I have a hard time believing there's not already a good open-source solution for it, but I have no idea what it is. I'm this close to just building it myself. Anything to wean these people off their Excel addiction.

429 points by iamacyborg 6y ago

capybara_2020 6y ago

This is the most confusing article layout I have ever seen. The first part is almost an article in size and is an ad and then what seems to be another ad about some people. I was about to close this article assuming it was just spam with a click baity title.

wmab 6y ago
Agreed, it's a well researched piece published without any editing. Some good treats in there though if you can find them!
mbreese 6y ago
I'm fairly certain the original format is for an email newsletter. Once I figured that out, it all made more sense.

Tade0 6y ago

I've been having this nagging thought lately: what if web app UIs started off as in-browser spreadsheets and evolved from that? After all 90% of web apps are just forms with some validation and lists of things - a spreadsheet can do all that with greater flexibility as a bonus.

nicoburns 6y ago
> just forms with some validation and lists of things - a spreadsheet can do all that with greater flexibility as a bonus. Speadsheets are great at a lot of things, but data validation doesn't tend to be one of them. In fact, I'd argue that's one of the main reasons to move off of spreadsheets: to make your data more structured. It may well be possible to create a spreadsheet-like UI that is good at these things though. And I can certainly see that being successful. It'd be difficult to tradeoff flexible vs constrained though.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  > Speadsheets are great at a lot of things, but data validation doesn't tend to be one of them. What limitations are you thinking of? I can go to Data -> Data Tools -> Data Validation and restrict to whole number, decimal, list, date, time, or string length. If that's insufficient, you can create a custom formula which has to evaluate to TRUE for the input to be considered valid. Regex isn't supported out of the box, but quite a number of string functions are, and there are readily available Regex user defined functions (VBA called via formala) available online. You can also customize the error alert that would be displayed to the user if they try to input something invalid. I think it'd work quite well for many MVP/single page web apps.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    The question is not what a sufficiently motivated competent person can do with the tools. It's what a sufficiently motivated incompetent person can do to your data with the tools. Infinite flexibility in the tooling means infinite ways to mess the database up in subtle and/or irredeemable ways, and a formula in a cell or even a regular expression are not great ways to tidy up real-world data, you often want autocorrect, autosuggest, defaults and friendly error messages for bad data rather than just ERROR IN CELL G91. When you reach that level of complexity it becomes much harder to build something useful with a spreadsheet-like tool alone. It is a really interesting idea though and for certain classes of data could really work well.
    - rvba 6y ago
      For many Excel projects you dont need data validation though.
lopatin 6y ago
Love the idea. An app that evolves from a spreadsheet is pretty brilliant, mate.
jason2323 6y ago
lol. One of my observations from my experience at startups : if you want to create a B2B SaaS company, convert a company’s spreadsheets into a webapp and voila!
nsm 6y ago
Airtable (airtable.com) is doing something like that. It’s less Excel and more a souped up relational database, so a slightly different angle where you surface the CRUD of a CRUD app to the user.
- hermitcrab 6y ago
  I see Airtable as an online database with the ease of use of Excel. I created a system for a local charity using Airtable. I found it worked really well and the charity are delighted.
sidpatil 6y ago
I think Microsoft dropped the ball big-time by not making it easy to export an Excel workbook or Access project as a mobile-ready turnkey Web application. (It looks like it's possible to do, but not easy to do—from what I can tell, it either requires Office 365 or third-party software.) If that functionality existed and was easy to use, it could have been a very convenient option for businesses running their operations on Access database and looking to take advantage of mobile. I know Microsoft has InfoPath and Forms, but those aren't Access, so they're not going to be as popular.
breck 6y ago
I figured out how to do this years ago, even before I worked at Microsoft (and pitched it while there a number of times). It wasn't easy, and there was a lot to figure out, but the end result is starting to look pretty simple: https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://github.com/publicdomaincompany/copypaster https://github.com/publicdomaincompany/copypaster
- Tade0 6y ago
  > In 2021 let's start making all web forms copy/pasteable. I love the premise - will give it a go.
  - breck 6y ago
    Great! If you take any notes on pain points trying to implement that pattern, would love to hear about them! My email is in profile
    - Tade0 6y ago
      Sure - I'll let you know.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  The copypaster.publicdomaincompany.com URL in the project About box is broken.
  - breck 6y ago
    Fixed! Thank you for letting me know!

wmab 6y ago

This is a well researched article touching on some key points as to why Excel lives on. Interesting for me is the unbundling of Excel, and the birth of many B2B SaaS products. I'm not sure Excel was ever the right program to generate many of these products, and so it makes sense someone built a specific program to house it (product boards, CRMs, calendars all fall in this imo). Others however, absolutely, I'm not sure the long term value in some products that can simply be done in Excel - often when a startup goes after one of these verticals it's hard to create value for the user and the business, because by building a product you are by definition limiting the potential/power of the program by limiting what it can do. So you're asking someone to pay for something that is more limited than it's Excel-cousin, but might be simpler to use and look prettier. An example to me of this is financial modeling / flightpath type apps for businesses. Instead of paying for a bunch of saas, maybe a company should go back to hiring more Excel ninjas, ergo Excel Never Dies.

williamtwild 6y ago

>But there’s one software product born in 1985 Excel born in 85? Ok, but spreadsheets were around long before Excel

Tijdreiziger 6y ago
That's discussed in the article.
kgwgk 6y ago
And long before computers!

syntaxing 6y ago

Excel just works so well, almost too well. Wanna share some formulas? Excel. Finance calculator? Excel. A small (<2000 lines) database? Excel. Even with Python for Google Sheets, I sometimes want to rip my hair out when I use Google Sheets compared to Excel (though the Google Python is pretty useful for autogenerated sheets).

scubbo 6y ago
> I sometimes want to rip my hair out when I use Google Sheets compared to Excel Earnest, non-"gotcha" question - what is it about Google Sheets that you dislike or find irritating? I'm only an entry-level user for both, but I've found them of similar quality and functionality.
- aaisola 6y ago
  Google sheets is useful for basic tasks. But as a power tool for complex models etc. it pales in comparison to excel. Not to mention that keyboard shortcuts are not the same which makes everything take significantly longer.
  - mediaman 6y ago
    Agreed. Google sheets feels great initially. Then you go to do that thing that you do in Excel, and...you look for it, and it seems like a basic omission, so you figure you just missed it, and Google around for it, and no, it's just not there. Even silly little things, like the fact that Sheets doesn't have an indent function, which makes it harder to neatly format financial data. I think the accepted workaround is to manually put spaces in front of every single row you need indented.
  - p00dles 6y ago
    ^1 for Excel keyboard shortcuts. One can customize the ribbon at the top for must used functions, which can make Excel such a fast tool to use compared to Google Sheets or even Excel for Mac (speaking as a Windows user). If I had a big Excel project to do, and I had the choice of 1/2 day on Excel (Windows) vs. a full day with Google Sheets or Excel (Mac), I would pick the 1/2 day with Excel (Windows).

Mengkudulangsat 6y ago

If Excel can handle >1m rows, all these "Big Data" analysis will just mean a bigger spreadsheet.

apples_oranges 6y ago

I've just read the chapters on VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 in "Founders at Work". It looks like VisiCalc made the Apple II take off back in the early days. And Lotus 1-2-3 addressed all the pain points people had with it a few years later on a more powerful platform (PC). Interesting stuff for sure. Why do I discover this book 12 years after it was published?

pmarreck 6y ago

I'm wondering if spreadsheets could be used as a tool to introduce programming to kids, since all the intermediate values are visible, and most programming is just data transformation. The fact that spreadsheets are effectively functional languages might mean that looping could be implemented as recursion with tail-call optimization... instead of only having cell references you could have references to keyboard or mouse input values, or URLs pulled from outside sources, or files read off the local storage... Instead of just having charting and graphing tools, you could have, say, a Turtlegraphics output box that would follow the instructions from some designated series of cells (which perhaps were themselves generated by formulas)

breck 6y ago

Spreadsheets and Programming Languages are about to procreate. The future is nigh. https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145 https://youtu.be/vn2aJA5ANUc?t=145

asdff 6y ago
They were procreating 45 years ago with S.
- breck 6y ago
  Link to a screenshot that shows relevance?

morningtigerx 6y ago

Another thing Excel can't do well is when you need multiple people to be updating a single spreadsheet shared in OneDrive / SharePoint. If too many people have it open, OneDrive can fail to merge the changes, and you might have races and end up with data corruption.

ekianjo 6y ago

Excel Never Dies except when you feed it more than 1 million rows which is very common these days. Completely outdated for many uses.

mbreese 6y ago
But that's rare for the vast majority of users. How many people need to really calculate with 1 million rows of data? That may be common in some fields, but when you hit that level of data, you know that you should be using other tools. Excel hits a solid sweet spot for a large percentage of the computing public.
- cyrialize 6y ago
  Agreed. People who use Excel daily knows it's limitations. They know that it can't work with huge amount of data, but they do know they could have their internal tech team upload the data into their database and send them a snippet of the data.
  - hermitcrab 6y ago
    Try telling that to the UK government: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
    - iamacyborg 6y ago
      Excuse me, our Tory government has a long history of competence. /s
rustybelt 6y ago
PowerPivot is one of the best ways to start exploring an unfamiliar dataset of 1 to 10 million records. Built into Excel.

zwieback 6y ago

I remember playing around with Multiplan and 1-2-3 in the 80s but the first time I saw Excel I knew I witnessed the birth of the greatest SW product of all times, ever. At the time engineers still spent a lot of time writing crappy one-off homebrew scientific apps and Excel really helped as a first platform for calculations you didn't want to do on your calculator. It's hard to imagine now but at the time PCs were command-line only and the early Excel versions, at least the one I saw, booted up a runtime version of Windows just to run Excel. I'm not sure whether they ported it over from MacOS to that special version or what but it was shocking to see.

selimthegrim 6y ago
Engineers can do better than Excel! See Blockpad (https://blockpad.net https://blockpad.net)
- zwieback 6y ago
  Looks nice, I'll give it a whirl.

aarondia 6y ago

Excel, and more importantly, the spreadsheet is the best way to build intuition for a dataset, hands down. The alternatives, especially when it comes to Python and the default pandas output in a Jupyter Notebook are horrendous. Where Excel falls short, is data size limitations + auditability. Putting more than 1M rows of data into Excel is not possible, and once you get into the low 100K's, it becomes almost unbearable. And handing off an Excel workbooks to a colleague is handing them hours of cell dependency tracing. On the other hand, data size + auditability are the super powers of Python data analysis. I've been building a Python package, Mito (https://trymito.io/ https://trymito.io/), its an interactive spreadsheet that automatically converts your spreadsheet analysis to the equivalent pandas code. You can write spreadsheet formulas, merge datasets, create pivot tables, etc. And because its implemented in Python, you can manipulate datasets with 10M rows of data with no problem. Our goal is to bring the intuitiveness of Excel data manipulation to Pandas.

tryitnow 6y ago
What's the pricing model? There's a lot of potential here.
- aarondia 6y ago
  We're still exploring the business model to support the project. Right now, Mito is free to trial, and we're experimenting with a subscription plan somewhere in the range of $10 per month. I'd say about half of our users are using it for free and half of them are on some sort of subscription. We're also considering open sourcing the tool, and doing the classic Enterprise Sales / consulting / other value add services on top. If you have ideas about which direction to take it, would love to hear!
Robotbeat 6y ago
What non-spreadsheet programming languages/environments do you think work better than Python/Jupiter? I’ve been fairly happy with the default Matlab IDE personally. Visibility and representation of data has the straightforwardness of a spreadsheet. But surely there must be others?

Buttons840 6y ago

I've been thinking about trying to create my own open source spreadsheet. I can't decide if they're simple or complicated. The simple view is that all you need is: (1) One main UI component, "the cell" (2) a domain specific formula / programming language (3) the underlying reactive system that tracks cell dependencies and updates them, etc.

munchbunny 6y ago
I think it depends on what you intend for it to be used for. The reductionist view of it is that it's a workspace for crunching numbers. But in practice, Excel is sometimes used like a frontend for a database engine, with sometimes heavy scripting to integrate into software processes and workflows. I think Excel's ability to stretch beyond what anybody would still reasonably consider the scope of "spreadsheet software" is why Excel is as entrenched as it is. I don't think many programmers see it as a safe or ideal way of handling the kinds of workloads that people use it for, but I think we all acknowledge its unmatched ability to let non-programmers automate data crunching.
airstrike 6y ago
Well, you can """Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#""": http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/# http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/# Posted here but didn't get traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24980325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24980325

hypermachine 6y ago

Not just Excel, the integrated scripting environment around it too. A lot of the heavy lifting in complex setups is done by custom VBA scripts.

onychomys 6y ago
Someday they'll update the VBA IDE to have some super basic features (like autoformatting or text highlighting or whatever). That'll be so great.
- hypermachine 6y ago
  Sign up for our mailing list (link in profile), that's what we are building (and more including support for collab editing, version control, and cloud native deployments).
- asdff 6y ago
  Someday accountants and business people everywhere will bite the bullet and spend the 5 hours or so it takes to get a working knowledge of R and finally step into the first world of programming languages.

tgb 6y ago

I hadn't used Excel in years and now that I do, there's some things about it that drive me nuts: - It forgets what you've copied to clipboard. Copy something. Insert another row so that there's space for it. Paste. Nothing happens. Huh? It lost my copy. It does this for a large number of operations and it drives me crazy. I've never seen any other program do this. - You can't open two spreadsheets of the same name. This is because spreadsheet formulas can refer to cells in other tables. But I don't use that feature - can't I just open the second spreadsheet with a warning that this feature won't apply to it? - (This one applies to too many pieces of Microsoft technology.) You can't use common keyboard shortcuts properly. Ctrl-backspace deletes a word in any useful text box. Not in formula editing in excel. And ctrl+delete deletes the rest of the line instead of just the next word. Why?

sokoloff 6y ago
The one that drives me insane is that while editing a cell formula, that using the arrow keys move cells (and update [read: wreck]) the formula rather than moving the cursor within the formula you're editing.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Just hit F2 while editing a formula to toggle between Edit and Enter modes, one of which will behave as you expect. The other mode, which you hate, is very useful when you want to add references to other cells into your formula
  - jacurtis 6y ago
    Yes, the edit mode (using arrows to create formulas) is actually something I really find convenient. To me it is a feature, not a bug. But yeah, F2 is fairly easy to use once you get used to it. Its like using VIM, the shortcuts seem annoying to the uninitiated, but once you get understand how everything works, the power can really speed things up and you appreciate it.
  - ska 6y ago
    > is very useful when you want to add references to other cells into your formula I really wish the default is the other way around. When I do want to add other cells, more than half the time there is a better way than using arrow keys.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Startups that began as a Craigslist category: https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/craigslist.jpg https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20... Now someone make that for web apps that began as an excel spreadsheet. Or even better, ML projects that should have stayed a simple spreadsheet.

guessbest 6y ago
If anyone wants to gather ideas on an app idea, they would be well served by running the following query in their favorite search engine : "<app idea> xlsx"

monroewalker 6y ago

Do others here still recommend using Excel/Google Sheets despite having programming knowledge, or are there more powerful tools available (eg. Airtable) which might be less accessible to people without tech backgrounds? If spreadsheets are still the way to go, any recommended resources on learning some best practices with them? I never got into spreadsheets because it seemed unnecessary after learning how to program, but I end up missing out on applications that might work in excel but which I don't care enough about to hand-write.

Arainach 6y ago
Excel is incredibly useful for all sorts of quick data crunching. My preferred introduction to intermediate-level spreadsheet usage is Joel Spoelsky’s “You Suck at Excel” https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c
aksss 6y ago
Absolutely. Excel is a workhorse. It would be like asking if, since I got my bulldozer, do I ever still use a shovel. Yes. All the time. It has massive casual utility on a day-to-day basis. Add to that a lot of your business partners communicate information in Excel. When I was a young programmer I intentionally developed good excel skills because it was the idiom my customers knew. I felt like they would think less of me if I wasn’t competent on such a basic tool of business. And I think that instinct was correct. I look at someone in the corporate world who’s unable to sling a good spreadsheet as developmentally disabled. Like if you walked in saying you don’t know how to use a word processor. Spreadsheets are a way of exchanging data between humans in the same that word processors facilitate this, but for structured data sets. Time spent learning basic Excel functions (math stuff and xlookup for example) and how to build pivot tables will pay you dividends over the years.
munchbunny 6y ago
Yes, I absolutely still recommend Excel/Sheets. It highly depends on what work you need to do, but in general I use Excel for quick and dirty data crunching where the number of rows isn't that big (<100,000) and I don't expect to need to repeat the analysis often. For example, as a cyber security analyst, one-off sifting through some CSV format logs. Being able to do some basic transforms on the data with the benefit of real-time visualization is nice.

fermienrico 6y ago

Native Windows XP + Excel was badass. No new features were needed. No one asked for anything else. It was feature complete. Have you tried running an older version of Excel (2007 era) even in a VM? It is lightning fast. No cell-movement animations and this unibar crap at the top, saving a file is 2 clicks away unlike the newer version going off to the cloud, making requests and having to back out to save locally. WTF. Excel is an amazing app. UI engineers and PMs at Microsoft are trying to kill it.

aksss 6y ago
That save as... workflow is most annoying. Adobe does that too. In almost every scenario there’s a sync tool to take care of cloud storage. The web is great, but the web is slow and brittle. The cloud save is best when it’s an asynchronous background task.

tgbugs 6y ago

In academic data management I have identified what I suspect is a common progression over the course of a career. Obliviousness to the problem. Rage at the inadequacy. Search for alternatives. Realization that you do not have the resources to build and maintain something else, much less train all the labs to use it. Further realization that it is harder to explain how to set the right file encoding and the fact that a csv file is not a colon separated file to hundreds of labs than to just accept xlsx. Acceptance that Excel is a more reasonable user interface for data deposition than anything you could come up with. It is sad, but at the end of the day, however bad Excel is for life sciences data (to the point where standards bodies renamed genes due to autoformat issues!?), it ends up being better when usability and bad data edge cases are considered. Defaults matter for non-technical users, and even asking them to change the format they save in to csv is likely to cause issues because it is one more manual step that can go wrong, or there is some locale nonsense that will cause something to break etc.

sega_sai 6y ago

As a person who mostly does (large) data analysis and mostly uses python, I've recently thought of when I prefer to use spreadsheets vs python and my (personal) conclusion was to use spreadsheets, when my data can fit into one screen. In that case with excel you directly see all your data, you can change inputs and see output change in real time. But if the amount of data is larger than that, I am better off with dedicated calculations (in say python) and plots summarizing the data.

SeanLuke 6y ago

> Excel, and more importantly, the spreadsheet is the best way to build intuition for a dataset, hands down. Excel is a low-dimensional, untyped, flat database. I couldn't think of something worse. It has been successful only because its design mimicked traditional accounting books. But for more complex datasets, ugh. Back in NeXTSTEP days there was Lotus Improv (and later Lighthouse Design Quantrix). It permitted high dimensions, true names for rows, columns, hypercolumns, cells, and so on, and sophisticated modeling capabilities. It was, clean, required none of the ugly bug-filled hacks you see in Excel, and very easy to get your head wrapped around. Of course it's dead now.

iamacyborg 6y ago
> It permitted high dimensions, true names for rows, columns, hypercolumns, cells, and so on, and sophisticated modeling capabilities. It was, clean, required none of the ugly bug-filled hacks you see in Excel, and very easy to get your head wrapped around. Of course it's dead now. Do named ranges in Excel not match some of what you're after here?
- SeanLuke 6y ago
  A little bit. But it's hard to explain just how advanced Improv was (and still is).

intrasight 6y ago

Me and spreadsheets go way back. My first job was hacking Lotus 1-2-3 at Kodak as a summer intern in 1985. I consider it my first programming job. A year later, I got interested in neural networks, and built back-propogation models in Excel on the mac. Yes very SLOW but still a great way to learn. As side project ten years back was to leverage Excel's native web query (IQY) mechanism to build a profitable SaaS company just based upon letting users get data into Excel from various 3rd party social media and analytics platforms. Now I work in big oil and our team basically turns Excel models that users create into scalable data warehouse apps. Even after years working with Excel, I still consider myself a journeyman.

sumtechguy 6y ago
Using excel for learning NN. Multi input on a node would be a bit wonky (but doable) and layers could just be sheets in the workbook. It even already has a bunch of nice built in tools to import/export data. That is one of those 'why did I not think of that' things!

coliveira 6y ago

One of the main excel advantages come from the fact that the app presents useful features and never changed their interface. Unlike modern software that try to change their workflow to "improve" it, excel has kept the same stable interface for decades. This allows people to create workflows built on the software, not fighting it. Excel users know that the interface they employ will be stable for another 20 years, or even more. Very few applications can say this, the other ones I know of including Vim and Emacs.

warmwaffles 6y ago
When they updated the interface from office 2003 to fit with the new hot rounded UI was a tragedy.
- asdff 6y ago
  No one held a gun to your head and told you to uninstall perfectly good office 2003
  - warmwaffles 6y ago
    Except when it was forced on us by our IT department.
    - chungy 6y ago
      And the file format was entirely replaced with XLSX. Yes, there were plugins to support XLSX (and even ODS) in Excel 2003, but it wasn't well-known.
charwalker 6y ago
Yeah, they tried adding a Ribbon once in 2007 and it blew up so much they left it in but barely changed it since.
asdff 6y ago
R would like a word. 45 years of workflows and still going.

hacker20210308 6y ago

I have a soft spot for Excel. It inspired me to do this 4 (almost 5 now) years ago in JavaScript. The prototype was written to prove a DOM renderer could handle trillion cell datasets having a high on screen cell density running at 60fps. Bonus: Watch to the end of the video to see video running in a cell. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-eDS4OZpk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-eDS4OZpk

omega3 6y ago

I don't see any software produced today approaching the level of user-centric productivity and speed one can get out of (keyboard only) Excel. Is software like this just not being produced now?

asdff 6y ago
It totally is. R is even faster and more productive than Excel.
jerjerjer 6y ago
Hilariously, Access is another Microsoft product which also helps with user-centric productivity. Many hate it but it sure is an easy way to build an entire data entry/CRUD app without any programming knowledge.

rob74 6y ago

...but where Excel really shines and enhances productivity is in combination with that other tool we all love and will never give up, email. Someone emails you (and 10 other persons) some data in an Excel sheet, you (and unbeknownst to you, 2 other persons) update the sheet with some new data and reply to the email, and after a few iterations nobody knows anymore how many versions of the document are in circulation and which one is the most up-to-date. Oh, joy!

aksss 6y ago
Sounds like a training issue - Excel has a much better tool available now. Click the “Share” button in upper-right corner and now you’re all working on same doc and have concurrent editing capability.

adamredwoods 6y ago

Excel is horrible to program in. Example: I needed to import a bunch of URLs, then pull the query params out and auto-create a SQL query based on those. I was able to do it, but when I entered the Visual Basic editor, it was a whole new word of UI hurt.

iamacyborg 6y ago
That sounds like probably the sort of thing that shouldn't be done in Excel though.
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  I like to push software around, but yes, there are better ways to do this.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Excel is horrible to program in. VBA, and the built-in DE for it, isn't great, but you can program Excel other ways (Office Add-In, xlwings, etc.)

ianhorn 6y ago

People are all talking about how it's useful for quick stuff with datasets, but it goes far beyond that. It's useful for quick anything you might want a small database for. Imagination is the limit. For example, if any of you play D&D online, you might be familiar with dndbeyond's character sheets. They're a fantastic way to onboard new players who might not have the inclination to spend hours with the rule books before they even start playing. It does all the calculations for you and gives you some buttons like "roll athletics" and doesn't let you add more spells than your character can have with their stats. I recently persuaded some friends to give FATE a try and built analogous push-button character sheets with google sheets [0]. It was quick and simple. With conditional formatting, you highlight bad states (rules say you can't have more of X than Y!). With the script editor, you can add full on buttons for dice rolls and other state changes with whatever logic you want (anything you can code up!). Checkboxes are obvious but super useful. And the transparency of the calculations is helpful for teaching people the system (this stat is "min(A4, B1+C5)"). Without google sheets, it would be a serious endeavor to build a stateful, database backed, live collaborative GUI that can be added to and customized on the fly by my users. With google sheets, it was a quick fun afternoon hack. Excel/google sheets is an amazing piece of technology. [0] Screenshot of the "app": https://raw.githubusercontent.com/imh/public_images/main/Screen%20Shot%202021-03-08%20at%209.37.17%20AM.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/imh/public_images/main/Scr...

asdff 6y ago
I find with excel it takes just as much time to set up a spreadsheet to do what I want as it takes for me to do the same in R, usually a lot more time with Excel. Both pieces of software have learning curves, just to me R is the better tool for the job for working with tabular data. Excel forces you to hardcode your fomulas and ultimately adds a lot of cruft and time wasted, compared to R which is much more modular. That "min(A4, B1+C5)" is liable to break if your spreadsheet changes. R functions on the other hand are pretty well documented, and you could do anything you want in R after following a tutorial for a couple hours. Instead of having to hard code a position, you can refer to it relatively or by some unique identifier, so your calculations still work no matter how your underlying spreadsheet changes or is shuffled around (and familiar formulae like sum and min and max are there by the same names). It's way easier to do statistical tests and plot data consistently in R as well. Oh, and you can export to .csv or .xlsx from R if you'd like of course.

chrisgd 6y ago

It is used as a graphics output of those financial models as well. Bankers, both commercial and investment, use it to copy and paste into PowerPoint presentations that form the basis of billion dollar transactions everyday.

hermitcrab 6y ago

I have built 3 commercial products: a seating planner, a visual planner and a data transformation tool. I'm confident that Excel is the main competitor for all 3.

hermitcrab 6y ago

If anyone is interested in reading about Excel related disasters then I recommend Matt Parker's intersting and entertaining 'Humble Pi' book.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

Like a lot of Linux zealots who ran Linux everywhere for 20 years, I hated most things associated with legacy Microsoft, because of EEE, and what they did through SCO. However, I had to relax my attitude about 10 years ago, when I realized that I owed my entire career to Excel. I've mostly made a living by being an engineer who creates proper, focused software tools for other engineers to use, and almost every program I've written is because there was a crappy Excel tool trying to cope with the problem, and falling over due to size and unshareability. That's when I write a website in Rails, or a WinForms .NET application, keep adding features until users stop asking for fixes, then move on to the next one. Of course, there's been ebb-and-flow in my career, but the bulk of it has been driven by the fact that Excel is so seductive, and easy to start something useful. Then, like a lot of Microsoft products, leaves you hanging when it's time to get serious. So, credit where it's due. Whatever you can say about it's shortcomings, they've been my bread and butter for 27 years, and counting.

F_J_H 6y ago
>> "Then, like a lot of Microsoft products, leaves you hanging when it's time to get serious." This is like a moving company saying their small moving vans "left them hanging" once they outgrew them and started doing national vs. local moves. A tool that proves useful at one stage is not useless because it can't be as useful at ALL stages. The great thing about Excel as it enables you to do the one thing that kills most start-ups, projects, etc., which is simple to start.
- aksss 6y ago
  > the one thing that kills most start-ups I thought you were going to say taxes and bookkeeping. :D
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  I mean... that's kind of exactly what underlies my whole comment.

xupybd 6y ago

The company I work for has their CAM manufacturing calculations run through excel. The non technical director has calculated every possible route line required for our CNC process. This is something that would be very hard to do in a conventional programming language. He did it with no coding background and it's one of the most maintainable pieces of software in the business. It's all laid out in front of you. If they need a diagram to explain something, it's there inline. There are no unreadable long nested if statements. He didn't even know you could nest them. It is truly amazing, I've not seen anything like it. I've seen plenty of train wrecks where people try to run other parts of the business through excel.

elliekelly 6y ago
The world would be shocked to know how many hedge funds and mutual funds are managed in excel workbooks. I worked with one RIA who (correctly, IMO) listed "excel" as a systemic risk to their business. If excel ceased to exist tomorrow they (and much of Wall Street) would be in a world of trouble.

beefield 6y ago

I'd have a couple of development proposals for excel: 1. Remove the ability to save workbooks. This would keep the excel in organisations where it excels (pun intended), namely quick & dirty sketches and visualizations. If you need something twice, it is likely you need that more than twice and you should be using something else. 2. If not that, give me a worksheet type that forces each cell in a column to have same formula or data type. and just a sheet that you can refer to as any other sheet, not a powerwhantnotthingy. 3. Version control. Seriously, Microsoft, what on earth are you paying your excel developers for if not this?

aarondia 6y ago
I totally agree that this makes sense for certain types of Excel work -- the data analysis, report generating workflows. You can see my comment above about how we're addressing some of these issues with Mito. However, not sure that these three points hold for the type of financial modelling work that is done in Excel today. There isn't a great unbundling of Excel for the LBO, etc world (yet), so the inability to save or have columns with multiple data types/formulas seems quite limiting for that world.
- beefield 6y ago
  I was thinking that there were two types of worksheets. the current, freeform sheets, and in addition to that a new type that would enforce data integrity over columns. That would make it much safer to have worksheets for structured data and freeform sheets for visualizing etc separate. (the first one was admittedly a bit tongue in cheek.)
aksss 6y ago
> 3. version control I think this is provided through either OneDrive/SharePoint or some other offboard solution. Do you really want Excel to have a native version control system? Seems like other solutions would always do this better.
- beefield 6y ago
  Does onedrive/sharepoint or some other offboard solution show diffs between versions and have merge capabilities? (I have not been using excel as anything but a scratchpad in years, so I may have missed some cool new features)

jedjdjdjaj 6y ago

Excel is shit.

makach 6y ago

Except for when it plunges itselfs into the fiery pits of Mordor

moonbug 6y ago

not only will it never die, it's more important and has greater impact than all your hipster languages ever will.

moonbug 6y ago

Excel is programming. fight me.

pjbster 6y ago

I will never trust Excel for manipulating any real world data. Period. Excel only keeps the first 15 digits of any number you give it [0]. If you want to keep the full number, you have to store it as text instead. And then you can't perform calculations with it without converting back to a number and losing fidelity. The two most prevalent data types in business are numbers and dates. It's incredible that Excel is rubbish at dealing with both and yet the world thinks it's the gold standard for doing "business-y stuff" in. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/last-digits-changed-to-zeros https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/l...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nly 6y ago
Presumably the 15 digits thing is because Excel stored numbers as IEEE binary64 doubles? It's amusing because real world JSON has exactly the same contraint, and that's arguably the most common data exchange format in the world now.
rvba 6y ago
What calculations do you make with "businessy" stuff that you need more than 15 digits of accuracy?
- pjbster 6y ago
  Financial data migration. Big numbers down to many decimal places. I lost days trying to locate a non-existent problem due to this "feature". Not to mention a stakeholder breathing down my neck.
  - rvba 6y ago
    What kind of finance numbers do you keep, that you need 15 digits of accuracy. Exchange rates are usually 4 digits. So where does the other 11 go and why do you need it? For example, this 0,00000000001 of a dollar?

Balgair 6y ago

Aside: Joel Spolsky's now famous talk about Excel is a must watch for anyone that uses Excel but hasn't been arsed to actually take a course in it. Even for Excel haters out there, the talk is very much worth your time today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

terryf 6y ago

Definitely it will never die. You know you've won when there's a special interest group (with a yearly conference!) focused on risks the software is creating http://www.eusprig.org/ http://www.eusprig.org/

_pdp_ 6y ago

Excel is great no doubt but everyone forgets that it is solving only some types of problems - mostly data input, fomula-based calculations, etc. It is completely unfit for purpose for others.

GnarfGnarf 6y ago

I've seen spreadsheets with horribly complex, incomprehensible algorithms, that are so much easier and simpler to write in C++ or Python or any programming language. BTW XLWare makes a great library LibXL to create genuine .XLSX files from a program.

fredfoobar 6y ago

OT, but does anyone remember the easter egg in excel that literally opened up a flight sim?

tonymet 6y ago

I would love an entire OS (like ChromeOS) & protocol around Excel/spreadsheet. you log in, and everything on your desktop is a spreadsheet : contacts, calendars, email/messaging, forms. Like a primitive hypercard with only table view.

hateful 6y ago

Over the years, the wife and I tried numerous shared calendars - but nothing has yet topped the one I made fairly manually in Google Sheets. I just copy a few rows down every once in a while and we keep it going. Color coded, Emoji for different types of events, each week is collapsible and shows just the emoji for that day. Never happier. Every other calendar's interface and customization seemed like a limitation rather than a feature.

submeta 6y ago

Is there a way to manipulate Excel cells from within Python/Pandas? Last time I checked I had a hard time to write to an existing Excel file (= prevent overwriting it). Would love to do the complex calculations in Python instead of using VBA.

silvershell 6y ago
I think XLwings (https://www.xlwings.org https://www.xlwings.org) can do some of that.
- submeta 6y ago
  This looks awesome! Thank you.
sidpatil 6y ago
You might be interested in Pyspread: https://pyspread.gitlab.io/ https://pyspread.gitlab.io/
iuqiddis 6y ago
I've used openpyxl[1] to access excel cells directly while using python [1] https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

jplr8922 6y ago

I used to think that I hated excel, and that as a DataScientist-TradingDeskAnalyst, python or R would save the world. Now I realize that my hatred for Excel has nothing to do with the software itself, but the way it is used for political motives. If your VP or Top Trader or Boss choose to keep everying on 'his' excel, its not for sofwtare quality. Its for control. You can run away with your excel-data-model on a USB stick. Not so true for SaaS. You can keep it on your PC, and not share it with others. You can put passwords without IT knowing about it. Excel = Shadow IT department with hidden political goals.

haolez 6y ago

Excel is like Emacs for non-programmers. It's a sandboxing tool for your imagination to go wild.

fersarr 6y ago

I'm also one of the people trying to build a more convenient way to do these kind of things: https://hupreter.com https://hupreter.com

mwcremer 6y ago

My wife uses Excel almost exclusively as a text layout tool. To the extent that while building an event plan in Excel she asked me, “What is 29 + 17?”

theropost 6y ago

We started with a simple excel tool, that has morphed into a visual pay system that talks to the database through SQL queries - it impresses me everyday how much this excel file does, and the 2000 users that use it daily say the same thing

smitty1e 6y ago
Excel is the Lowest Common Denominator of UX. You can show them an .xlsx, and there is no fear, and thus some chance of user acceptance. There is enough structure that you can process it, and enough programmability to get by. The format is broadly accessible across platforms. It's not perfect, but it's a great going-in position.

toyg 6y ago

> Excel may be the most influential software ever built I'd argue that award should go to the real pioneers of spreadsheet applications: LANpar, VisiCalc, and to an extent Lotus 1-2-3 and LoGisTiX. What has really stood the test of time is the concept of spreadsheets, not anything specific to Excel. Excel didn't do anything particularly revolutionary, it didn't set out to "influence" anything. It just competed on feature-matching and cut-throat commercial practices until all the others had died. A great achievement for sure, but praising that over VisiCalc and Lotus is a bit like praising Toyota over Henry Ford when it comes to automobile production chains.

rbobby 6y ago
There was a really useful spreadsheet application for DEC's RSTS/E... named "calc" maybe? The innovative part of it was a cell formula included an output directive. So the normal excel formula in cell b1 of "=sum(a1..a26)" has it's output written to b1. But with calc you could in cell b1 put "b2=sum(a1..a26)" and the result would be written to b2. This became super powerful when dealing with ranges. You could have 1 formula that that calculate the row-wise total for each row... and it would be in 1 cell, so for example "$1..$10=sum($1..$9)" (forgive me I can't recall the addressing specifics for relative/fixed/named ranges). It was pretty amazing at the time.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
Well, the linked article points out that Excel's engineers came up with a new, better, and much faster way of doing recalculation than Visicalc and 1-2-3 had at that point -- and it was arguably the first spreadsheet program built for the GUI era. Both of those things were new features, and they really mattered. Excel didn't win just based on marketing alone.
- fsckboy 6y ago
  the same people who designed and built Microsoft Multiplan (a dud if there ever was one) also went on to create Excel, an odyssey that started in 1983, and that version was created for an early version of Windows that didn't get any traction, and then Excel was rebuilt for the Mac, so that's v2 (3 if you count Multiplan), and then when recreated again it finally took off after many years with the success of Microsoft Windows 3.0 starting in 1990. Excel only won from the years of longevity provided by a deep pockets company with a vested interest in extending its monopoly, with a little help from Lotus who really dropped the ball on the switchover to GUIs

zelphirkalt 6y ago

This probably has been said before and relates to spreadsheets in general, instead of only to Excel: Well written spreadsheets, if they have need for formulas, can be seen as examples for functional programming, where a cell takes input from specified other cells and the result is in the cell itself, not modifying its arguments, so that it stays the true result at any point in time. This has some advantages and can give a spreadsheet a set of advantages over imperatively written programs processing the same data. Additionally spreadsheets allow for a very short feedback cycle. Of course there are downsides to it as well.

mathgladiator 6y ago

I have found Excel deeply awesome to use, and I am building a reactive programming language inspired by the concepts (for board games!). The key is that a single script defines the entire workbook's logic, then data sits externally within a giant JSON object. I'm trying to find a balance between the engineering concepts (source control, data versioning, audit logs) and productivity (how easy is the language and related tools). I'm currently working on a editor for board games where I get playful with how to build UIs for the language. It's fun, but I'm wondering if I am re-inventing hypercard. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-being-lazy-is-key http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-being-lazy-is-key One mental model is that the entire document is just an Excel sheet that you can send messages to and learn of updates reactively. http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/reference-reactive-formulas http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/reference-reactive-formulas

cutler 6y ago

One minute we're effusing about Excel's magical powers as if databases and programming languages were an afterthought, the next we're all over Excel's flaws after yet another financial company is caught with its trousers down for relying on Excel for too much of its data infra. Excel is just a spreadsheet already.

xyzelement 6y ago

Excel is amazing for rapid data analysis and modeling, the flexibility it provides is exceptional when you're working alone and are trying to do one thing, fast. It becomes a pain when you're trying to use it to enforce workflows, across multiple people. The problem is that it works "well enough" that building a proper data model/system to replace the spreadsheet workflow is not going to get prioritized because it already sort of works and there are likely bigger problem areas in the org. It's a pretty classic problem where something enables you to solve a problem fast and well enough as to often preclude an excellent solution. On the flip side, if something is new/evolving and is handled in excel, it's a mistake to try to tighten it up in an application right away because you are going to end up evolving the app at a cost whereas evolving the spreadsheet would have been nearly free.

codesnik 6y ago
excel is a grandiose waste of human time, exactly because of that "well enough" feature set.

codesnik 6y ago

Spreadsheets, as they incarnated in Excel are akin to running old style no-named-subroutines, only-two-chars-per-variable-name, goto-line-number BASIC but on modern hardware. Ideas that could potentially grow into something safe and powerful cannot grow now because of market dominance of that outdated monster. And I keep hearing the same arguments, like "it can be used without knowing how to program" - but have you actually seen those formulas they enter? How exactly it differs in complexity from, say, SQL? At least in SQL you'll have sanely named columns and can actually see logic, reading it a month later. Mixing datasets and freeform reports in the same sheets is a design mistake. Having auto-conversion for data is a design mistake. Not having enforced row/column sets instead of just typing any formula anywere is a design mistake. All that leads to millions of wasted hours of human life just looking closely on rows and rows of numbers with squinted eyes, trying to figure where accidental keystroke had broken your data. I really liked how MacOS Numbers approached spreadsheets, before they were somewhat butchered for ipads and excel compatibility: spreadsheets were not "infinite", separating concept of tables from concept of pages; column and row headers automatically used as names in formulas instead of undescriptive A1:B2 format, making them actually readable. Unfortunately it was also slow as hell. Airtable is a good direction for data entry purposes by multiple people, unfortunately it's no good for even medium sized tables, and exporting is limited.

pfundstein 6y ago
Tables are, of course, an excellent way of organizing data. Now add in the easy point and click UI and simple formulas to get you hooked, and soon you find yourself deep in VLOOKUPS and macros with no way back. Excel eases you into data organisation and manipulation. Many tools are better for any given task, but Excel excels at generalising.
- SavantIdiot 6y ago
  I taught an engineer how to do 2D iterative scenarios with TABLE(), and his XLS files began taking 30+ minutes to open. Every XLS ended with "-DANGERTABLES.xls" to remind us not to accidentally click it and kill our machines. [For those who don't know, it's basically a way to reduce a massively interconnected spreadsheet (dozens of sheets) as f(x,y)=z, and then make hundreds of tables built with that function. Insanely powerful, but causes spreadsheets to grind to halt every time you touch a cell (unless you turn off auto computation).]

doggydogs94 6y ago

Most important keystroke when working on a spreadsheet, cntl-z, Undo.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Makes its closed-source storage format all the more a travesty. All office file formats have stopped document and information processing and search way harder, and have been a lock-in pox on the world for, what, 3 decades now?

SavantIdiot 6y ago

Excel is like the yellow engineering pads: essential for an engineer. I tried to use Google Sheets, but nothing matches the speed of popping open excel, and the functionality (still can't do 2D TABLE solvers in Sheets AFAIK). I know Sheets can work offline, too, but it is sluggish compared to native Excel. I had issues for years with Excel on Mac doing wonky things, but with the latest non Office365 version, they've fix a lot of issues (mostly rendering). I got into JMP but only because my employer paid for it (it's like $15k i think), but while it is powerful stats engine, it lacks the sheer imaginative flexibility of a spreadsheet. There really aren't many other choices, are there? I mean, prior to excel, lotus123 was de-facto, and the last time I tried StarOffice it hurt my soul.

shimonabi 6y ago

I went to live in a German speaking country for a few years and the most astounding and unsettling thing I learned the whole time there was that function names in Excel are also translated to German. For example, you need to use SUMME instead of SUM.

theshrike79 6y ago
At one point even VBA was localised...

leibnitz27 6y ago

Excel never dies, but BOY does it get worse with each iteration. It often feels to me that in the last several releases all that's been done is apply more and more lipstick to a pig that's already 90% lipstick. I recently fired up excel 2003 on a whim (yep, I'm that much of a party animal.) MY GOD. It was blazingly fast. Beautiful. Usable. (If you ignore the fact that the one good change in the last 2 decades is the XLOPER12, allowing >255 rows and lots of columns). (X) (X) Yes, Lambda looks interesting, but HOF aren't really necessary in basic sheets, I'd rather they got it usable first.

theshrike79 6y ago

My Master's Thesis was to develop an automated testing platform for TETRA phones[1]. It was programmed with VBA and ran on top of Excel. The UI was a sheet of buttons and the results were outputted to a tab on the same sheet. I even added a cheapo webcam to it, which would record the phone display during tests and save the .avi file if the test failed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Just wrote a complex calculation for my wife's work in Anthropology, regarding translating a Canadian grid to gps coordinates. In Excel. Because it was there, and it can encapsulate a complex expression and present it as a field and resulting value. So no, even if Excel died we'd need something much like it the next day.

mcv 6y ago

At my current job, I've really come to hate Excel. Business is completely addicted to it. Despite Data Quality being an explicit concern that we're supposed to work on, they love maintaining their hand-typed data in Excel sheets, referring to other data with hand-typed names instead of proper foreign keys, and then I'm supposed to load and connect all that crap. And nobody is using it for actual calculations, which is what spreadsheets are for. I would really, really like a flexible database with an Excel-like front-end and easily-definable columns that make use of foreign keys, so we can actually maintain some data quality here. And what I'm looking for sounds so obvious that I have a hard time believing there's not already a good open-source solution for it, but I have no idea what it is. I'm this close to just building it myself. Anything to wean these people off their Excel addiction.