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Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I use it for blogposts, presentations, documentation, todos, internet comments. But t

Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I use it for blogposts, presentations, documentation, todos, internet comments. But this article doesn’t strike a chord with me. The author fails to understand that it seems easy to us because we’re familiar with it. Of course we know how to transform it into PDF or HTML. But this knowledge isn’t basic, and it’s understandable that people want to stick to what they know. Here’s an example. Say you had 10000 rows of CSV to slice and dice and extract insights and visualisations out of. All of us would go to the tools we’re familiar with - pandas, R, duckDB etc. But I think the median Excel user probably completes this task quicker and better than the median pandas user. And then if the pandas person is told “oh, just pick up Excel, it’s easy to learn and so useful” they won’t listen. And for good reason! Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. Don’t confuse the familiar with easy. Just because it’s easy for you doesn’t mean it’s objectively easy.

mlatu 4y ago
> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. this right there. except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. the interface is what makes it easier, markdown is also an interface. except it's not AS exposed to the user as excel is. people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation, they want to hit the ground running.
- crdrost 4y ago
  Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide columns you don't want to see. • Excel has no compilation or run step. The document is living and when you change things you immediately see the results of that change. This means that the programming model in Excel becomes much more amenable to the results-oriented mind. Decide on an incremental goal, then calculate a bunch of results “the long way” and then massage the formula until it gives a result that matches your manual calculations. Repeat as desired. It's like clay, basically. You sculpt it to look right and then you sculpt the next piece to build on that and so on.
  - MrPatan 4y ago
    Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?
    - asddubs 4y ago
      it's a character
    - dbalatero 4y ago
      You can tell it's a character because the wrapped lines don't indent & align like a real bullet list.
    - crdrost 4y ago
      I was on my mobile, I think the keyboard is Gboard, you have a symbol keyboard with two pages and the second page has the bullet. Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...
  - ryanjshaw 4y ago
    One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful. If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      > when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimplemented in a programming language.
- pxc 4y ago
  > except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went. For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category. So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high. And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this > [Excel] IS easy to learn actually is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools. Which takes us back to GP's statement: > > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. Moreover, these statements > if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. > people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way. > it's visual, you can click around and find out > they want to hit the ground running Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever. And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow. When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around. Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.
hawski 4y ago
I wouldn't say that Excel is harder to learn. I was thought the basics of it in primary school. I don't think Panadas could be thought at the same level, you need to know Python first and that is a mountain, even if there are much higher mountains. With Excel you mostly need to know about cell addressing, =, dragging corner of selection, $, ranges and some basic formulas (that currently are much easier to explore than when I was first approaching the subject). That is, I think, around 80% of Excel as it is used, maybe even more.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Right I’m speaking about slightly advanced Excel. Everyone knows how to sum/average columns or apply basic formulae. But creating pivot tables and using macros isn’t self-evident or easy to figure out by clicking around.
mejutoco 4y ago
Not contradicting you. Just adding this famous case of using Excel. > the median Excel user probably completes this task quicker and better than the median pandas user Some might complete it with catastrophic effects. > A million-row limit on Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
- nindalf 4y ago
  Yeah, that's the flip side of a simple tool that makes it easy to solve problems. It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it. On the other hand, the bespoke software approach can have bugs too.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    I agree bespoke software could have bugs, of course, but this bug seems unique to excel. I would say excel is a tool that makes it easy to solve _easy_ problems. I do not think Excel is simple. IMO it is less intimidating to users because it is graphical and does not look like programming. > It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it. Excel row limit could clearly fail in a non-silent way, and it would be a better tool. They chose "simplicity" by ignoring errors.
  - Kye 4y ago
    There are a lot of times where a low-level understanding of Computer Stuff lets me easily get problems in simple stuff. Like if I see a year that's 1969 or a number that's in the negatives and around 4 million, I know some kind of overflow happened and can work from there to diagnose the problem. I don't know the right balance, though. I know all this stuff because you just had to if you wanted to do anything with a computer beyond simple office tasks. Even advanced stuff has nice interfaces these days. My new laptop with a dGPU comes with software that has an overclock toggle and some guidance on how to get the most out of it, warnings, etc. That's a long way from editing files to make HIMEM.SYS work so Wing Commander would run.
c22 4y ago
I would use Visidata [0] and get it done before excel finished importing the csv file. [0]: http://www.visidata.org http://www.visidata.org
tasuki 4y ago
Also don't confuse "easy" and "simple". "Easy" is subjective and related to familiarity, while "simple" is a more objective concept. Eg. Markdown is objectively simpler than MS Word.
azangru 4y ago
> just pick up Excel Pandas are free; Excel is not.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Excel is installed on my work computer. How do you install pandas and will IT let me install it?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > How do you install pandas and will IT let me install it? Okay, if we're doing arbitrary restrictions then Excel isn't available for my OS.
    - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
      Office runs on wine.
- internet2000 4y ago
  Excel Online and Google Sheets are free.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  LibreOffice is free
nuancebydefault 4y ago
Indeed. I'm a programmer, and if i have a 30 by 30 table of numbers with colon headers coming produced by an app or a script, my first reaction is to select, copy, paste it in excel, press search in excel and type 'text to columns'. Next step is search for 'chart'. In between I can experiment with just a few mouse clicks with different chart types, draw a trend line, add a caption,... Of course when this needs automation, further steps need to be taking using a script in combination with pandas or the like, but only after a quick assessment using excel.
Aeolun 4y ago
> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. This may be true in a general sense, but probably not when you talk about the programmer picking up Excel. I often find I can use it for more things than people that spend their whole lives in excel simply because I have a reasonable mental model of what it should be able to do. That said, I want to talk to whoever made the abomination that is VLOOKUP and ask them why.
codyb 4y ago
It's like learning anything. Learning to sew was a never ending sequence of small steps that required lots of looking up to actually grok. Thread the bobbin then put it in the bobbin holder, then swap in a denim needle, thread the needle from your main spool, switch to a straight stitch with a wide length, and adjust your tension disks appropriately while practicing on a sample patch. Place your main garment in, do a backstitch, and sew your lines. All of this is super simple, but if you're just getting started, each step requires a manual (and it even glosses over a few really important parts like making sure to put your presser foot up or down while sewing).
KronisLV 4y ago
> Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I'm inclined to agree, for the display of some text, it's one of the better choices that I've encountered! I actually recall working on a system where HTML instead of Markdown was chosen for the storage and display of user messages (think along the lines of a chat/e-mail app), which came with a plethora of complexity and problems - everything from various editors across apps formatting things differently (sometimes breaking WYSIWYG), to the formatting in the database becoming inconsistent as the apps and libraries are updated but old messages weren't affected, any sort of manual parsing and migrating this data being difficult, as well as sanitization concerns and security challenges. The Markdown suggestion of mine was shot down, but as far as I know there was just problem after problem with using HTML before I took a break from that org and took a bit of a sabbatical. Then again, migrating between different formats like Markdown and HTML is needlessly complicated if you have pre-existing data, so it's better to make the "correct" choice on day 1.

mlatu 4y ago

> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. this right there. except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. the interface is what makes it easier, markdown is also an interface. except it's not AS exposed to the user as excel is. people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation, they want to hit the ground running.

crdrost 4y ago
Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide columns you don't want to see. • Excel has no compilation or run step. The document is living and when you change things you immediately see the results of that change. This means that the programming model in Excel becomes much more amenable to the results-oriented mind. Decide on an incremental goal, then calculate a bunch of results “the long way” and then massage the formula until it gives a result that matches your manual calculations. Repeat as desired. It's like clay, basically. You sculpt it to look right and then you sculpt the next piece to build on that and so on.
- MrPatan 4y ago
  Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?
  - asddubs 4y ago
    it's a character
  - dbalatero 4y ago
    You can tell it's a character because the wrapped lines don't indent & align like a real bullet list.
  - crdrost 4y ago
    I was on my mobile, I think the keyboard is Gboard, you have a symbol keyboard with two pages and the second page has the bullet. Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...
- ryanjshaw 4y ago
  One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful. If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    > when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimplemented in a programming language.
pxc 4y ago
> except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went. For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category. So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high. And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this > [Excel] IS easy to learn actually is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools. Which takes us back to GP's statement: > > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. Moreover, these statements > if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. > people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way. > it's visual, you can click around and find out > they want to hit the ground running Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever. And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow. When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around. Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.

hawski 4y ago

I wouldn't say that Excel is harder to learn. I was thought the basics of it in primary school. I don't think Panadas could be thought at the same level, you need to know Python first and that is a mountain, even if there are much higher mountains. With Excel you mostly need to know about cell addressing, =, dragging corner of selection, $, ranges and some basic formulas (that currently are much easier to explore than when I was first approaching the subject). That is, I think, around 80% of Excel as it is used, maybe even more.

nindalf 4y ago
Right I’m speaking about slightly advanced Excel. Everyone knows how to sum/average columns or apply basic formulae. But creating pivot tables and using macros isn’t self-evident or easy to figure out by clicking around.

mejutoco 4y ago

Not contradicting you. Just adding this famous case of using Excel. > the median Excel user probably completes this task quicker and better than the median pandas user Some might complete it with catastrophic effects. > A million-row limit on Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

nindalf 4y ago
Yeah, that's the flip side of a simple tool that makes it easy to solve problems. It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it. On the other hand, the bespoke software approach can have bugs too.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  I agree bespoke software could have bugs, of course, but this bug seems unique to excel. I would say excel is a tool that makes it easy to solve _easy_ problems. I do not think Excel is simple. IMO it is less intimidating to users because it is graphical and does not look like programming. > It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it. Excel row limit could clearly fail in a non-silent way, and it would be a better tool. They chose "simplicity" by ignoring errors.
- Kye 4y ago
  There are a lot of times where a low-level understanding of Computer Stuff lets me easily get problems in simple stuff. Like if I see a year that's 1969 or a number that's in the negatives and around 4 million, I know some kind of overflow happened and can work from there to diagnose the problem. I don't know the right balance, though. I know all this stuff because you just had to if you wanted to do anything with a computer beyond simple office tasks. Even advanced stuff has nice interfaces these days. My new laptop with a dGPU comes with software that has an overclock toggle and some guidance on how to get the most out of it, warnings, etc. That's a long way from editing files to make HIMEM.SYS work so Wing Commander would run.

c22 4y ago

I would use Visidata [0] and get it done before excel finished importing the csv file. [0]: http://www.visidata.org http://www.visidata.org

tasuki 4y ago

Also don't confuse "easy" and "simple". "Easy" is subjective and related to familiarity, while "simple" is a more objective concept. Eg. Markdown is objectively simpler than MS Word.

azangru 4y ago

> just pick up Excel Pandas are free; Excel is not.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Excel is installed on my work computer. How do you install pandas and will IT let me install it?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > How do you install pandas and will IT let me install it? Okay, if we're doing arbitrary restrictions then Excel isn't available for my OS.
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    Office runs on wine.
internet2000 4y ago
Excel Online and Google Sheets are free.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
LibreOffice is free

nuancebydefault 4y ago

Indeed. I'm a programmer, and if i have a 30 by 30 table of numbers with colon headers coming produced by an app or a script, my first reaction is to select, copy, paste it in excel, press search in excel and type 'text to columns'. Next step is search for 'chart'. In between I can experiment with just a few mouse clicks with different chart types, draw a trend line, add a caption,... Of course when this needs automation, further steps need to be taking using a script in combination with pandas or the like, but only after a quick assessment using excel.

Aeolun 4y ago

> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. This may be true in a general sense, but probably not when you talk about the programmer picking up Excel. I often find I can use it for more things than people that spend their whole lives in excel simply because I have a reasonable mental model of what it should be able to do. That said, I want to talk to whoever made the abomination that is VLOOKUP and ask them why.

codyb 4y ago

It's like learning anything. Learning to sew was a never ending sequence of small steps that required lots of looking up to actually grok. Thread the bobbin then put it in the bobbin holder, then swap in a denim needle, thread the needle from your main spool, switch to a straight stitch with a wide length, and adjust your tension disks appropriately while practicing on a sample patch. Place your main garment in, do a backstitch, and sew your lines. All of this is super simple, but if you're just getting started, each step requires a manual (and it even glosses over a few really important parts like making sure to put your presser foot up or down while sewing).

KronisLV 4y ago

> Literally everything I write is in Markdown because it’s so simple to me. I'm inclined to agree, for the display of some text, it's one of the better choices that I've encountered! I actually recall working on a system where HTML instead of Markdown was chosen for the storage and display of user messages (think along the lines of a chat/e-mail app), which came with a plethora of complexity and problems - everything from various editors across apps formatting things differently (sometimes breaking WYSIWYG), to the formatting in the database becoming inconsistent as the apps and libraries are updated but old messages weren't affected, any sort of manual parsing and migrating this data being difficult, as well as sanitization concerns and security challenges. The Markdown suggestion of mine was shot down, but as far as I know there was just problem after problem with using HTML before I took a break from that org and took a bit of a sabbatical. Then again, migrating between different formats like Markdown and HTML is needlessly complicated if you have pre-existing data, so it's better to make the "correct" choice on day 1.