3 ms·

> but the features 99% of users need are all here. I cannot believe this, in particular for the comparison Excel vs. LibreOfice Calc: the latter is used insane

by q-big 4y ago

> but the features 99% of users need are all here. I cannot believe this, in particular for the comparison Excel vs. LibreOfice Calc: the latter is used insanely actively in the finance and insurance industries, thus any proper user sampling should bias towards these industries. On the other hand: users in these industries know Excel really well and use very advanced features of it.

squarefoot 4y ago
That is true, but let's not forget that the userbase that needs only basic spreadsheet functions or simply a tool for writing text documents is vastly superior. One of my accountants used StarOffice like 20 years ago, and I recently serviced a business consultant office in which all machines had OpenOffice (installed before the LibreOffice split). Excel is for sure a monster feature-wise, but outside of certain niches the need of all those features is really low, then again many Office users didn't even know about its existence since all they need is to read and write text documents.
danuker 4y ago
I have performed logistic regression in Calc, by using the Solver feature to find coefficients, after multiplying the input with them, passing the output to a sigmoid, and computing the mean squared error. I suspect anything more advanced than this would be better worth implementing as a script, rather than using Excel. The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.). But even then, perhaps a script or Jupyter Notebook would be easier to work with (for diffs and version control that are not vendor-locked).
- q-big 4y ago
  > The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.). No, the main argument why Excel is used in the finance and insurance industries is that many users know Excel really well.

by q-big 4y ago

squarefoot 4y ago

That is true, but let's not forget that the userbase that needs only basic spreadsheet functions or simply a tool for writing text documents is vastly superior. One of my accountants used StarOffice like 20 years ago, and I recently serviced a business consultant office in which all machines had OpenOffice (installed before the LibreOffice split). Excel is for sure a monster feature-wise, but outside of certain niches the need of all those features is really low, then again many Office users didn't even know about its existence since all they need is to read and write text documents.

danuker 4y ago

I have performed logistic regression in Calc, by using the Solver feature to find coefficients, after multiplying the input with them, passing the output to a sigmoid, and computing the mean squared error. I suspect anything more advanced than this would be better worth implementing as a script, rather than using Excel. The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.). But even then, perhaps a script or Jupyter Notebook would be easier to work with (for diffs and version control that are not vendor-locked).

q-big 4y ago
> The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.). No, the main argument why Excel is used in the finance and insurance industries is that many users know Excel really well.