I am a software developer by trade and I’m writing mostly backend stuff for 22 years. Here’s my take on Excel. Recently I went through the process of creating

I am a software developer by trade and I’m writing mostly backend stuff for 22 years. Here’s my take on Excel. Recently I went through the process of creating a non-trivial spreadsheet with bunch of tables, custom formulas and such. Things like costs with cost groups, person-days, person-availability, social costs, package calculations, profit and loss projections… I’m mind blown. Excel is a powerful technology. It’s amazing how it tracks cell references in formulas and calculations automatically when rows/columns are added or removed. Real-time visual feedback is unprecedented. You have 20 interconnected formulas? Awesome, change one value and everything recalculates in front of you. It took me 22 years to arrive at the conclusion that some tasks are just simpler with a spreadsheet. Especially when I want to present the outcome to non-dev people. You go into a meeting and someone asks you “what happens if they travel so and so often instead of what you have now”. Or “what if we add these two things into that cost group and won’t offer x and y, can you also hide that for a second just to compare”. This is so easy to amend in Excel. Good luck opening your editor and changing the code live because you haven’t planned for a third travel option. Google Sheets is okay. I'm missing tables since I started using them in Excel. Named tables with totals row is just so handy.