4 ms·

>Your first argument is that "boomers dont know / want to use excel properly". What is not really an argument. it's the other side of the coin for "last democr

by _dain_ 3y ago

>Your first argument is that "boomers dont know / want to use excel properly". What is not really an argument. it's the other side of the coin for "last democratic thing that allows non-programmers to build things" (which I sympathize with). you can't just ignore the capabilities of the userbase demographics. >Also it is common knowledge that MS tries to get rid of open spreadsheets - only allowed competition are google sheets. it's not microsoft's fault LibreOffice doesn't have tables. OnlyOffice has them. there's a feature request thread in the LibreOffice archives, someone asked for excel-style tables to be implemented. the LO devs didn't even know what they were(!), people had to explain it to them. dev response was lukewarm. there doesn't seem to be any great push to implement it. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132780 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132780 >If your Excel doesnt have array formulas - please get a newer version. Even 2003 had them. I mean the new ones. the dynamic array formulae with the spill behaviour. SEQUENCE, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, etc. those are only in office 365. >As someone trying to learn SQL, the syntax of typical queries(one page long, not some basic ones) is horrible - the language is completely not designed for tasks when you glue 20 tables together... are those queries easy to understand / inspect? IMHO no. no disagreement there, SQL is not a good language. have you tried M?

rvba 3y ago
Well you can. You can ask "boomers" to build stuff in a real programming language. Which they wont. Also you act as if there werent any programming horror stories. Very often programmers want to rewrite the code they got from othera. ** I am not sure which one is M and which one is DAX. Those are the PowerBI ones. In my opinion they are horrible. The idea of "steps" makes sense, but the gui that breaks steps is horrible. Also the syntax is horrible. ** MS at some point had pivot tables, pivot tables with data model, power pivot, powerBI stand-alone app, "old" sql query editor. Now they try to add powerBI standalone back to Excel.. partially (on a side note I hate that poweBI exports from stand alone app to Excel are so horrible), and they got rid of the old SQL editor. If you want to write SQL in Excel you might as well use notepad.. PowerBI was supposed to be a step forward. OK it allows to build things, but is in my opinion horrible. M/DAX are horrible to use for typical operarions such as; Changing source Combining two sources Joins Joins on joins on joins Joins Syntax is supposed to be explicit, but it is horrible to write and horrible to read

by _dain_ 3y ago

rvba 3y ago

Well you can. You can ask "boomers" to build stuff in a real programming language. Which they wont. Also you act as if there werent any programming horror stories. Very often programmers want to rewrite the code they got from othera. ** I am not sure which one is M and which one is DAX. Those are the PowerBI ones. In my opinion they are horrible. The idea of "steps" makes sense, but the gui that breaks steps is horrible. Also the syntax is horrible. ** MS at some point had pivot tables, pivot tables with data model, power pivot, powerBI stand-alone app, "old" sql query editor. Now they try to add powerBI standalone back to Excel.. partially (on a side note I hate that poweBI exports from stand alone app to Excel are so horrible), and they got rid of the old SQL editor. If you want to write SQL in Excel you might as well use notepad.. PowerBI was supposed to be a step forward. OK it allows to build things, but is in my opinion horrible. M/DAX are horrible to use for typical operarions such as; Changing source Combining two sources Joins Joins on joins on joins Joins Syntax is supposed to be explicit, but it is horrible to write and horrible to read