8 ms·

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternativel

by inglor 3y ago

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

sneak 3y ago
It won't work offline, for one. I use Office exclusively without internet as otherwise who knows what private stuff it's sending back to Microsoft, which then becomes eligible for warrantless surveillance by the federal police. I know it's old fashioned to want local software to only change things on my local file system, but if I didn't want that paradigm, I'd just use Google Docs.
- nmstoker 3y ago
  Yes, this is important where you're online but not on a high throughput connection or any part of the connection has intermittent faults. The disruption from even a few outages is enough to prefer to run things locally. We had issues with people unable to sign into Excel and everyone went mad (rightly so, as Excel was running locally not 365 but it blocked usage) And on top of that, there are scenarios where you'd want to process substantial amounts of data that would be prohibitive to upload, process and return the results, where locally handling it would take way less time.
- LispSporks22 3y ago
  I eventually gave up on it because of the locals vs cloud differences. The documentation for the whole thing was terrible as well. I think they’re in transition (assuming cloud only). In my case, I just went and used Calc from LibreOffice.
sixothree 3y ago
Can you just please fix the issue with date strings (such as "20230822090811") being converted into scientific notation? I've received literally hundreds of these documents over the past decade. And as long as this problem exists, I will keep receiving them. Can you please just add a button - "unmess this document"? The number of man-hours I've wasted re-creating documents is countless. My job is to do other things not fix excel documents.
- john-radio 3y ago
  The scientific notation ("2.02308E+13") is just how Excel displays a large enough numeric value like your example; it's not doing any conversion, as you can see if you paste that number into Excel, confirm that it's showing the scientific notation, and then click into the cell to confirm that the formula bar still shows the original number (20230822090811). If you paste your date string in a more standard date format like 2023-08-220 9:08:11, then Excel will correctly infer that it is a date. However, you seem to be saying that Excel should handle ANY numerical strings that way if they are long enough to express a date or datetime, which, while it might make your particular workflow easier (or it might not), it would really mess with people's ability to use Excel with large numerical values...
  - sixothree 3y ago
    Do you _really_ think I've spent the past 10 years getting files like this and I still don't understand the reason. I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a fix. What are you doing here?? I can provide instructions on how to do this until the cows come home. I will still get files with these issues. Is that not obvious? Do you really think I want to examine _tens of thousands of rows_ in documents that are 100 cells wide looking for a single exponent value!?!?!?! Is that really what you're suggesting as a fix here?
    - DandyDev 3y ago
      My my, why so angry? You're expecting something that Excel doesn't support for good reason. The string you used as an example might be a date string to YOU, but to Excel and many of its users it's just a large integer. Lots of regular use cases would break if Excel would interpret that string as a datwle If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
      - mulmen 3y ago
        It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data. The anger is warranted. The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data, it is that a poor assumption actually mangles data. Excel doesn’t fail safe. Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated. If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t notice) but it is real. > If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601 You don’t always control the upstream system. Your response can be considered rude because it implies you think you know more than the person expressing pain. This is especially insulting with such a widely known problem in Excel. This behavior burned me with billing system IDs. Logically they are strings, we would never do math on them. For performance they were implemented as BIGINTs in the DB. Excel truncates everything after the 15th digit. Our IDs were all over 20. So accounting couldn’t reconcile our reports with the billing system.
cableshaft 3y ago
I think it's similar to the current generative A.I. trend. The companies I work for while consulting (mainly financial and health organizations) have been very cautious about any company or PII data going to these A.I. programs, and the cloud in general, and are looking to make their own local run generative A.I. LLMs for their employees to use. By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications. But I'm just a software engineer at the end of the day, and don't professionally use Excel all that much right now (if anything I use it much more for my hobby of board game design). So I can't speak with too much authority on the matter. Just my observations.
- fzumstein 3y ago
  > By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications. This is exactly what I see when talking to users about xlwings: it needs to run on their end, behind their firewall, in exactly the cloud they have picked (AWS, GCP, Azure).
  - chasd00 3y ago
    I do a lot of work with US state governments, it's the same story mostly. It's possible to get the approvals required for data to be shipped off to some "cloud" but it has to be FedRAMP certified and no data can move outside the contiguous 48 states.
cameronh90 3y ago
We use Excel for a bunch of "critical" tasks as defined by the financial regulator, which means any of their dependencies also have to be assessed to ensure they meet the required level of stability. What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty sure that would unfortunately rule out using it.
- orf 3y ago
  Having seen the quality of “critical” macros, excel spreadsheets, and “dev/prod” SMB drives anyone can mess with it’s absolutely clear no regulator gives a fuck.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Or their concern and that of an engineer don't completely agree, or the reasons they want concerns addressed are different. Both happens a lot.
easton 3y ago
I can put this in an email if you want, but one good reason would be that my laptop is probably faster than the cloud compute that they are willing to give away to 365 subscribers. I can do much more inefficient things in a single cell if I know my laptop can pick up the slack :) (Although, I'm guessing the reason they did it this way is so they could keep the execution model the same for Excel on the web? It's always running on the external service vs sometimes running locally and sometimes running externally.)
alexk307 3y ago
Not OP but I would never want to use this if I was running a security minded business. Why would it be okay to send out my entire dataset to the Microsoft cloud to run a few simple queries. How long is the data stored on your servers? Since it’s operating on the data directly, it’s not possible to anonymize or redact the contents of the data.
- benterix 3y ago
  Practically speaking, if you are running recent versions of Windows (I don't remember when exactly this trend started, with 2000? XP?), you have basically no control over what data you send to them and when. You can try to block traffic but it will interfere with normal Windows operations. You can try to investigate and play cat and mouse game with Microsoft, but they will always be one step ahead of you - unless you decide to turn off automatic updates and make your system less secure.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    What if I’m running windows in a VM in Ubuntu and only feeding it exactly the relevant stuff?
    - lolinder 3y ago
      You still have no control over the data you place into the Windows VM, which would include the data in the Excel sheet.
      - cmcconomy 3y ago
        does he have control over whether he transmits any data he places in the mysterious windows VM?
    - benterix 3y ago
      It makes little difference if it's a VM or bare metal - what matters is network connectivity. If it's on, you lose control over the data leaving your computer. In Linux, BSD and others, you can control it in a very precise way.
nerdponx 3y ago
Part of the reason I still like Excel over Google Sheets is that I can use it completely offline.
ooterness 3y ago
Ever used Excel inside a SCIF? There's a lot of important work that happens on computers that aren't connected to the Internet.
graypegg 3y ago
Is there any technical reason excel couldn’t ship with Python? The license allows it [1] and it would probably solve the issue of all users being able to open any document like the cloud solution, but still run locally. [1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq#Can_I_bundle_Python_with_my_non-open-source_application.3F https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicense...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
UweSchmidt 3y ago
The Cloud, and therefore the integration of as much as possible in it, is core Microsoft strategy. It's about the recurring payments, the lock-in, and ultimately literally having the knowledge and business processes of the world economy on their own computers. If this is true, the reason why it is important to run data and scripts locally should be clear, and so is the motivation of your PMs to actively combat any such things. But if you get a summary in your inbox and show it to your PMs let us know how that goes down.
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  Yeah, but they also make money on the office subscriptions. So you also want current working data scientists who would not touch excel to give it a chance because they can use their existing python back-end. Eventually, there would be a service that is Microsoft exclusive, but they have to compete on services. Idk, it's really up to Microsoft's business units. Office could be the loss leader to get cloud business, but it could be the other way too. Either way, I would hazard that they want people to actually use this integration feature.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    It all sounds a little too "Software services as a software service." Python -> Excel sounds great. Cloud Python -> Cloud Excel sounds too much like a privacy and security disaster waiting to happen.
gte525u 3y ago
ITAR and other regulatory issues - being the primary. Not all users are on Office 365 GCC High.
bluedino 3y ago
>> Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to How out of touch with the real world is the Excel team?
- graypegg 3y ago
  A hacker news comment chain isn’t a great place to follow up on feedback. Email’s alright! I don’t think that’s too out of touch.
  - rvba 3y ago
    Will Excel fix linkages between files on sharepoint? It is horrible.. The amount of lost productivity because "report file" cannot easily connect to "source 1, 2, 3" is very high. In theory you can do it, but it plain does not work in shared sheets.
    - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
      I've possibly seen some of your breakage with Sharepoint, while supporting an integration product between Excel and some enterprise systems. Does the problem persist if you ensure the other source files are open before opening "report file"? If opening the files in the right order solves it, then it may be possible to script this in Excel or in an Excel add-in (optionally, signed).
- mulmen 3y ago
  You have an opportunity to expand their perspective and this is the best response you can come up with?
- zadjii 3y ago
  Customer verbatims are like, an incredibly valuable currency. It's all fine to say "I know the product in and out and I think this is important". But it's another thing entirely to say "I know this is important because _this customer right here asked for literally this_".
bsder 3y ago
How about an actual API that lets you drive Excel from Python rather than the other way around? With that API, it won't matter whether you want Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever, for your scripting language. This is nice, but it welds a specific version of Python inside Excel and makes it a gigantic PITA to use your normal development tools on your Python code.
- rewgs 3y ago
  Completely agree. MS should just do Google Apps Script but better.

by inglor 3y ago

sneak 3y ago

It won't work offline, for one. I use Office exclusively without internet as otherwise who knows what private stuff it's sending back to Microsoft, which then becomes eligible for warrantless surveillance by the federal police. I know it's old fashioned to want local software to only change things on my local file system, but if I didn't want that paradigm, I'd just use Google Docs.

nmstoker 3y ago
Yes, this is important where you're online but not on a high throughput connection or any part of the connection has intermittent faults. The disruption from even a few outages is enough to prefer to run things locally. We had issues with people unable to sign into Excel and everyone went mad (rightly so, as Excel was running locally not 365 but it blocked usage) And on top of that, there are scenarios where you'd want to process substantial amounts of data that would be prohibitive to upload, process and return the results, where locally handling it would take way less time.
LispSporks22 3y ago
I eventually gave up on it because of the locals vs cloud differences. The documentation for the whole thing was terrible as well. I think they’re in transition (assuming cloud only). In my case, I just went and used Calc from LibreOffice.

sixothree 3y ago

Can you just please fix the issue with date strings (such as "20230822090811") being converted into scientific notation? I've received literally hundreds of these documents over the past decade. And as long as this problem exists, I will keep receiving them. Can you please just add a button - "unmess this document"? The number of man-hours I've wasted re-creating documents is countless. My job is to do other things not fix excel documents.

john-radio 3y ago
The scientific notation ("2.02308E+13") is just how Excel displays a large enough numeric value like your example; it's not doing any conversion, as you can see if you paste that number into Excel, confirm that it's showing the scientific notation, and then click into the cell to confirm that the formula bar still shows the original number (20230822090811). If you paste your date string in a more standard date format like 2023-08-220 9:08:11, then Excel will correctly infer that it is a date. However, you seem to be saying that Excel should handle ANY numerical strings that way if they are long enough to express a date or datetime, which, while it might make your particular workflow easier (or it might not), it would really mess with people's ability to use Excel with large numerical values...
- sixothree 3y ago
  Do you _really_ think I've spent the past 10 years getting files like this and I still don't understand the reason. I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a fix. What are you doing here?? I can provide instructions on how to do this until the cows come home. I will still get files with these issues. Is that not obvious? Do you really think I want to examine _tens of thousands of rows_ in documents that are 100 cells wide looking for a single exponent value!?!?!?! Is that really what you're suggesting as a fix here?
  - DandyDev 3y ago
    My my, why so angry? You're expecting something that Excel doesn't support for good reason. The string you used as an example might be a date string to YOU, but to Excel and many of its users it's just a large integer. Lots of regular use cases would break if Excel would interpret that string as a datwle If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
    - mulmen 3y ago
      It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data. The anger is warranted. The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data, it is that a poor assumption actually mangles data. Excel doesn’t fail safe. Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated. If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t notice) but it is real. > If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601 You don’t always control the upstream system. Your response can be considered rude because it implies you think you know more than the person expressing pain. This is especially insulting with such a widely known problem in Excel. This behavior burned me with billing system IDs. Logically they are strings, we would never do math on them. For performance they were implemented as BIGINTs in the DB. Excel truncates everything after the 15th digit. Our IDs were all over 20. So accounting couldn’t reconcile our reports with the billing system.

cableshaft 3y ago

I think it's similar to the current generative A.I. trend. The companies I work for while consulting (mainly financial and health organizations) have been very cautious about any company or PII data going to these A.I. programs, and the cloud in general, and are looking to make their own local run generative A.I. LLMs for their employees to use. By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications. But I'm just a software engineer at the end of the day, and don't professionally use Excel all that much right now (if anything I use it much more for my hobby of board game design). So I can't speak with too much authority on the matter. Just my observations.

fzumstein 3y ago
> By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications. This is exactly what I see when talking to users about xlwings: it needs to run on their end, behind their firewall, in exactly the cloud they have picked (AWS, GCP, Azure).
- chasd00 3y ago
  I do a lot of work with US state governments, it's the same story mostly. It's possible to get the approvals required for data to be shipped off to some "cloud" but it has to be FedRAMP certified and no data can move outside the contiguous 48 states.

cameronh90 3y ago

We use Excel for a bunch of "critical" tasks as defined by the financial regulator, which means any of their dependencies also have to be assessed to ensure they meet the required level of stability. What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty sure that would unfortunately rule out using it.

orf 3y ago
Having seen the quality of “critical” macros, excel spreadsheets, and “dev/prod” SMB drives anyone can mess with it’s absolutely clear no regulator gives a fuck.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Or their concern and that of an engineer don't completely agree, or the reasons they want concerns addressed are different. Both happens a lot.

easton 3y ago

I can put this in an email if you want, but one good reason would be that my laptop is probably faster than the cloud compute that they are willing to give away to 365 subscribers. I can do much more inefficient things in a single cell if I know my laptop can pick up the slack :) (Although, I'm guessing the reason they did it this way is so they could keep the execution model the same for Excel on the web? It's always running on the external service vs sometimes running locally and sometimes running externally.)

alexk307 3y ago

Not OP but I would never want to use this if I was running a security minded business. Why would it be okay to send out my entire dataset to the Microsoft cloud to run a few simple queries. How long is the data stored on your servers? Since it’s operating on the data directly, it’s not possible to anonymize or redact the contents of the data.

benterix 3y ago
Practically speaking, if you are running recent versions of Windows (I don't remember when exactly this trend started, with 2000? XP?), you have basically no control over what data you send to them and when. You can try to block traffic but it will interfere with normal Windows operations. You can try to investigate and play cat and mouse game with Microsoft, but they will always be one step ahead of you - unless you decide to turn off automatic updates and make your system less secure.
- boppo1 3y ago
  What if I’m running windows in a VM in Ubuntu and only feeding it exactly the relevant stuff?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    You still have no control over the data you place into the Windows VM, which would include the data in the Excel sheet.
    - cmcconomy 3y ago
      does he have control over whether he transmits any data he places in the mysterious windows VM?
  - benterix 3y ago
    It makes little difference if it's a VM or bare metal - what matters is network connectivity. If it's on, you lose control over the data leaving your computer. In Linux, BSD and others, you can control it in a very precise way.

nerdponx 3y ago

Part of the reason I still like Excel over Google Sheets is that I can use it completely offline.

ooterness 3y ago

Ever used Excel inside a SCIF? There's a lot of important work that happens on computers that aren't connected to the Internet.

graypegg 3y ago

Is there any technical reason excel couldn’t ship with Python? The license allows it [1] and it would probably solve the issue of all users being able to open any document like the cloud solution, but still run locally. [1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq#Can_I_bundle_Python_with_my_non-open-source_application.3F https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicense...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

UweSchmidt 3y ago

The Cloud, and therefore the integration of as much as possible in it, is core Microsoft strategy. It's about the recurring payments, the lock-in, and ultimately literally having the knowledge and business processes of the world economy on their own computers. If this is true, the reason why it is important to run data and scripts locally should be clear, and so is the motivation of your PMs to actively combat any such things. But if you get a summary in your inbox and show it to your PMs let us know how that goes down.

GabeIsko 3y ago
Yeah, but they also make money on the office subscriptions. So you also want current working data scientists who would not touch excel to give it a chance because they can use their existing python back-end. Eventually, there would be a service that is Microsoft exclusive, but they have to compete on services. Idk, it's really up to Microsoft's business units. Office could be the loss leader to get cloud business, but it could be the other way too. Either way, I would hazard that they want people to actually use this integration feature.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It all sounds a little too "Software services as a software service." Python -> Excel sounds great. Cloud Python -> Cloud Excel sounds too much like a privacy and security disaster waiting to happen.

gte525u 3y ago

ITAR and other regulatory issues - being the primary. Not all users are on Office 365 GCC High.

bluedino 3y ago

>> Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to How out of touch with the real world is the Excel team?

graypegg 3y ago
A hacker news comment chain isn’t a great place to follow up on feedback. Email’s alright! I don’t think that’s too out of touch.
- rvba 3y ago
  Will Excel fix linkages between files on sharepoint? It is horrible.. The amount of lost productivity because "report file" cannot easily connect to "source 1, 2, 3" is very high. In theory you can do it, but it plain does not work in shared sheets.
  - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
    I've possibly seen some of your breakage with Sharepoint, while supporting an integration product between Excel and some enterprise systems. Does the problem persist if you ensure the other source files are open before opening "report file"? If opening the files in the right order solves it, then it may be possible to script this in Excel or in an Excel add-in (optionally, signed).
mulmen 3y ago
You have an opportunity to expand their perspective and this is the best response you can come up with?
zadjii 3y ago
Customer verbatims are like, an incredibly valuable currency. It's all fine to say "I know the product in and out and I think this is important". But it's another thing entirely to say "I know this is important because _this customer right here asked for literally this_".

bsder 3y ago

How about an actual API that lets you drive Excel from Python rather than the other way around? With that API, it won't matter whether you want Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever, for your scripting language. This is nice, but it welds a specific version of Python inside Excel and makes it a gigantic PITA to use your normal development tools on your Python code.

rewgs 3y ago
Completely agree. MS should just do Google Apps Script but better.