4 ms·

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 tes

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.

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.