7 ms·
Except that it's proprietary and will eventually be un-maintained and stop working. But spreadsheets, in general, fall under the Lindy effect and open source so
by ravetcofx 2y ago
Except that it's proprietary and will eventually be un-maintained and stop working. But spreadsheets, in general, fall under the Lindy effect and open source software will continue it for centuries to come.
- Closi 2y agoAlthough excel spreadsheets have had more longevity than lots of other formats…
- Dalewyn 2y agoYou might have had a point in the days of .xls, but Excel by default uses .xlsx now which is just XML packaged inside a .zip archive if I recall. And yes, Excel still fully supports .xls too. I fear whatever format LibreOffice uses will die first, case in point I don't even remember what it's called even though I should as a computer nerd.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoMS-OOXML is barely an open format. Have you tried implementing it? ECMA-376 part 1 is over 5000 pages, and there are four parts to it! (Part 1 contains an extra bit about SpreadsheetML, but by that point we were two zips deep. I turned back ere I got lost.) The OpenDocument formats, meanwhile, are older, simpler and better than their MS-OOXML equivalents. (The ODF spec is 1041 pages altogether – 215 pages of that are the spreadsheet formula language.) LibreOffice's implementation is a little janky, sure, but I can edit OpenDocument files by hand. Try doing that to a MS-OOXML file. (Good luck.)
- Yossarrian22 2y agoIts easier for me to imagine a world in which AI makes spreadsheets invisible to the modern person than it is to imagine a world in which Excel isn't the de facto spreadsheet.