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I hate Excel, not because it's a bad program but because in my experience people misuse it more often than not. Excel excels at creating spreadsheets. Spreads

I hate Excel, not because it's a bad program but because in my experience people misuse it more often than not. Excel excels at creating spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are pretty reports used to report tabular data. Excel is capable of so much more, but for eveything beyond spreadsheets it's medicore at best and its complexity often makes it a liability. It's a bad calculator. It's a bad database. It's a bad medium for transferring data. It's a bad front-end. It's a bad notetaking app. If your use case goes beyond making tabular data look pretty, Excel is probably bad at it. People use Excel for everything because they're comfortable with it. But other solutions are often much better and I'm so tired of cleaning up all the issues Excel has caused (and continues to cause) me.

bartread 5y ago
I think this is a really unfair comment. Excel is a very powerful tool. It's great for financial modelling and prototyping, for example. It can be great for testing out different scenarios and investigating likely outcomes. It's also something that most people in most businesses have installed and as such, can be incredibly helpful for sharing data, models, etc. The collaborative editing in Office 365 adds a new dimension in that (finally) we don't have to email round documents and implement half-cocked versioning any more (though plenty of people still do), and multiple people can make changes at the same time. If you want to slag off any of the applications in Microsoft's Office suite then the correct answers (and I don't think this is particularly controversial) are Outlook and Teams. If you want real productivity destroyers and daily pain, look no further. Excel? It's great. Yes, it can be misused, but so can Python, Rust, C++, JavaScript, and every other tool, language, and platform at our disposal. So can a circular saw for that matter. That doesn't make any of them bad tools.
- CivBase 5y ago
  I think you missed my point. Yes, Excel is a very powerful tool and I would never argue otherwise. I definitely wouldn't argue against using it altogether. But I have come to loathe it because of how often it is misused. Sure, any tool can be misused. But in my experience Excel gets misused more than anything else combined. Excel's accessibility and ubiquity is part of what makes it so powerful... and what compels people to use it where other tools are much better suited. Don't get me wrong. It's okay to use a suboptimal tool... to a point. Users should be aware of a tool's limitations and seek out better solutions when it's clear those limitations will cause problems. Excel is not a bad tool. It's so popular because it really is a good tool. It's just not the ultimate tool.
hodgesrm 5y ago
We run our company finances off Google Sheets, which is essentially Excel, but shared. It's an outstanding tool for financial modeling as well modeling in many other domains. We would not be able to function without it. The fact that others may misuse it does not change things for me. p.s., Google Sheets is one of the more underrated cloud apps of all time.
greazy 5y ago
I completely agree with your main point: excel is terrible because people use it for everything. I've noticed there different ways people use excel: as a dashboard, to store data, to modify data. IMO storing data is the worst use of excel, especially when it's done in a non 'tidy' fashion , with highlights and formatting to encode data. This is from my experience as an R and python user in science.
romwell 5y ago
Nah. Spreadsheets are poor man's MapReduce. Most Excel tables I've seen aren't just data and presentation. It's computing the data as well as presenting it. And how is the data computed? * Applying formula to a row/column range to get another range * Applying formula to a range to get a single-cell output out of it Obviously, I am not talking about clustering and performance here, but a computational paradigm.
- CivBase 5y ago
  > Spreadsheets are poor man's MapReduce. Yes. Emphasis on "poor man's". Excel is mediocre at many things, but it's highly accessible so people use it anyways. That can be good or bad depending on the situation. Need to quickly crunch numbers for a small dataset? Excel is perfect. You can probably put something together quickly to get what you want. Need to maintain a contact tracing database? Not so great. Excel scales poorly and the low implementation cost isn't worth the limitations and risks.

bartread 5y ago

I think this is a really unfair comment. Excel is a very powerful tool. It's great for financial modelling and prototyping, for example. It can be great for testing out different scenarios and investigating likely outcomes. It's also something that most people in most businesses have installed and as such, can be incredibly helpful for sharing data, models, etc. The collaborative editing in Office 365 adds a new dimension in that (finally) we don't have to email round documents and implement half-cocked versioning any more (though plenty of people still do), and multiple people can make changes at the same time. If you want to slag off any of the applications in Microsoft's Office suite then the correct answers (and I don't think this is particularly controversial) are Outlook and Teams. If you want real productivity destroyers and daily pain, look no further. Excel? It's great. Yes, it can be misused, but so can Python, Rust, C++, JavaScript, and every other tool, language, and platform at our disposal. So can a circular saw for that matter. That doesn't make any of them bad tools.

CivBase 5y ago
I think you missed my point. Yes, Excel is a very powerful tool and I would never argue otherwise. I definitely wouldn't argue against using it altogether. But I have come to loathe it because of how often it is misused. Sure, any tool can be misused. But in my experience Excel gets misused more than anything else combined. Excel's accessibility and ubiquity is part of what makes it so powerful... and what compels people to use it where other tools are much better suited. Don't get me wrong. It's okay to use a suboptimal tool... to a point. Users should be aware of a tool's limitations and seek out better solutions when it's clear those limitations will cause problems. Excel is not a bad tool. It's so popular because it really is a good tool. It's just not the ultimate tool.

hodgesrm 5y ago

We run our company finances off Google Sheets, which is essentially Excel, but shared. It's an outstanding tool for financial modeling as well modeling in many other domains. We would not be able to function without it. The fact that others may misuse it does not change things for me. p.s., Google Sheets is one of the more underrated cloud apps of all time.

greazy 5y ago

I completely agree with your main point: excel is terrible because people use it for everything. I've noticed there different ways people use excel: as a dashboard, to store data, to modify data. IMO storing data is the worst use of excel, especially when it's done in a non 'tidy' fashion , with highlights and formatting to encode data. This is from my experience as an R and python user in science.

romwell 5y ago

Nah. Spreadsheets are poor man's MapReduce. Most Excel tables I've seen aren't just data and presentation. It's computing the data as well as presenting it. And how is the data computed? * Applying formula to a row/column range to get another range * Applying formula to a range to get a single-cell output out of it Obviously, I am not talking about clustering and performance here, but a computational paradigm.

CivBase 5y ago
> Spreadsheets are poor man's MapReduce. Yes. Emphasis on "poor man's". Excel is mediocre at many things, but it's highly accessible so people use it anyways. That can be good or bad depending on the situation. Need to quickly crunch numbers for a small dataset? Excel is perfect. You can probably put something together quickly to get what you want. Need to maintain a contact tracing database? Not so great. Excel scales poorly and the low implementation cost isn't worth the limitations and risks.