3 ms·

I cannot imagine a single piece of software that is more widespread and used without issue by huge swathes of people than excel. But one specific use case for

• quantified 5y ago
  Right. I doubt genomics registered as much of a market segment, and probably still doesn’t register.
• setr 5y ago
  ? Excel documents almost always have issues, independent of genomics[0]. I can probably just skim through my emails and find a bunch of problem spreadsheets all over. Fundamentally, the problem is threefold. 1) excel tries to be smart, and this works in the easy case and breaks down in the edge cases. The edge cases also tend to appear with larger data entry as various one-offs, so it’s particularly insidious 2. Excel is difficult to validate (formulas are hidden, naming things properly is a bit of a hack, no real typechecking, data constraints can be set but it’s hard to check what’s set to what across all cells, etc) 3. The typical user / target market isn’t trained to use what facilities excel does happen to offer. Ultimately, the problem is that excel doesn’t “scale”, and by default you get the wrong thing. And even if you know how to set things up properly, it’s near impossible to be sure it stays proper. [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-er...