13 ms·

'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

• vlovich123 2y ago
  Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.
  • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    But then you have all the usability issues of a complex app shoehorned into a browser. I'll always use a native application when it's available.
    • baq 2y ago
      Sheets is unfortunately mostly better than Numbers.
    • thimabi 2y ago
      Not disagreeing, but I find it very ironic that there’s little difference in performance between Excel as a native app and as a web app. I don’t know if that mostly reflects the technical prowess of the web dev team or the inefficiencies of the native app.
      • dartharva 2y ago
        That's incorrect. Not only is the web app drastically trimmed of features, but is also in no way a match to the native app in performance. You can test for yourself - try doing some complex operations on large datasets on both. See which one performs better.
  • dartharva 2y ago
    Excel leaves GSheets and all its alternatives in the dust in terms of performance and stability. I used to maintain MIS trackers in Google Sheets once, and when my company made the inevitable shift to MS Suite I saw an immediate improvement. FWIW I'm 25.
    • gregates 2y ago
      Well, not all its alternatives. There's one spreadsheet out there that has better performance than Excel: https://rowzero.io/home https://rowzero.io/home
      • eviks 2y ago
        How is its offline performance?
    • vlovich123 2y ago
      I think you’re talking about it in a professional environment. That won’t matter if the people are growing up on GSheets today & demand that tool from their employer. Very old tale in SW.
      • baq 2y ago
        Employers will tell them that their serious sheets only work in excel and it’s similar enough that they’ll figure it out and they’ll be right on both counts.
        • vlovich123 2y ago
          Depends on the profession. The company might shell out money for accounting to use excel. But PMs, engineers, TPMs, etc etc are likely to be told “hey we’re using google workplaces and aren’t going to buy you an excel license” unless you can make a very convincing case. That represents a shrinking pie for Excel even if specific professional use remains on Excel while everyone else moves on. Similar stuff happened with things like COBOL, IBM mainframes, etc. That’s why Microsoft competes with their 365 offering, but Google really put a dent in Microsoft’s near monopoly on OS+productivity tools that they built up and cemented in the 90s/early 00’s.
  • baq 2y ago
    Free isn’t good enough. Sheets has stupid limitations like a hard cap of 10M or so cells per document.
  • happytoexplain 2y ago
    I love GSheets for convenience. But as soon as you're doing anything large and complex, GSheets might as well not even exist. It's simply not viable.
    • vlovich123 2y ago
      GSheets is the good enough factor and the collaborative features were baked in from the start. I feel like MS struggles a bit in that respect. Look at the instructions for collaborating in Excel: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-excel-workbooks-at-the-same-time-with-co-authoring-7152aa8b-b791-414c-a3bb-3024e46fb104 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-ex...
      • financetechbro 2y ago
        I’ve had the pleasure of investing many hours across excel and gsheets. I’m currently at an org that uses MS suite and excel collaboration across OneDrive & Sharepoint is almost seamless now as long as long as you’re on the cloud
        • zo1 2y ago
          I don't think people are remotely aware how Good MS tools are atm when it comes to collaboration and integration with their "other" suit of tools. Yes, it's ugly sharepoint under the hood somewhere, but for all intents and purposes it looks and works like magic when I'm collaborating in real-time with my coworkers over any sort of MS document. This whole "real time collaboration" comment as a reason to prefer some half-baked and confusing "GSheets" web app is frankly confusing. Though, now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense: We are in an industry where the newcomers are being indoctrinated via evangelists and overall Schadenfreude, into using half-baked "IDEs" like VSCode.
          • sam29681749 2y ago
            Our team runs into errors (changes not syncing, etc.) on a regular basis 'collaborating' with Excel. definately doesn't work like magic in my experience.
  • fassssst 2y ago
    Excel is free online too.
  • mindslight 2y ago
    Immediately focusing on the distinction between Microsoft Excel Proper and competing implementations with essentially similar functionality is so weird to me. I feel a fondness for this article despite not having used Microsoft Excel itself for like two decades. The point is the larger genre, and the empowerment of programming and data management capabilities it creates for regular users.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    I have private information in my files, and I don't want to share it with google. Google will scan it, use it for ad profiling, sell to whomever and store all commits for eternity. Quote probably government has access too. And, of course, they will use it for AI training, which could be reverse-engineered in the future to extract training data.
    • ddingus 2y ago
      Exactly. I always have at least one machine setup with all local tools and storage. Any new ideation and certainly anything private gets done on that computer first.
  • heraldgeezer 2y ago
    I worked for an MSP in Europe, so IT provider. No company used Google Workspace. All where Office 365. You use what the company wants you to use :) If you zoomerettes try to use your own google account you will get flagged for data extraction. :) Also the web version of office is free, did you know? https://www.office.com/ https://www.office.com/
• smallerdemon 2y ago
  My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.
  • baq 2y ago
    Numbers could be nice if it was fast. Unfortunately it’s dog slow. It’s good enough with the simplest formulas, but once you try to actually use it for anything, it becomes unbearable.
    • alwillis 2y ago
      Certainly Numbers 14.2 on a recent Mac isn't slow. Not saying you're doing this but it's not uncommon for someone to say something is slow when it's a version from 10 years ago.
  • YVoyiatzis 2y ago
    I've exclusively used Numbers for as long as the app has been around. It meets all of my needs, including almost seamless Excel compatibility for imports and exports should the need arise. The IT industry overall remains similarly entrenched. Enterprise software vendors insist on Windows dependency, staying tethered to outdated standards; upholding an inefficient status quo that serves only MSFT, developers, and technicians—not users nor progress.
  • LightBug1 2y ago
    And us industry standard excel users hate when we send you Excel sheets (for a good reason) and then you use and edit them in .numbers, and then send them back as .numbers without a care in the world ... often we lose all the background goodness we built in (often designed to make your life easier!) ... you in the general sense ... calms shaking rage
• standardUser 2y ago
  I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date. Google Sheets is great, but I'm probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a more robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.
  • hotsauceror 2y ago
    I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one. Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation? I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.
    • CogitoCogito 2y ago
      To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        The "paste with styles" default is one of the worst things ever IMO. It's almost never what I want.
        • andersa 2y ago
          I hate it so much... some programs are even worse, they don't take ctrl shift v to get rid of the garbage. I've made it a habit to first paste stuff in a text editor, copy it again, and then paste it into programs like outlook so the formatting won't be all messed up... Still don't know of a single case where the "feature" was useful.
• NeoTar 2y ago
  Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme). I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, but missing another, allowing better testing, and type safety for data.
  • baq 2y ago
    Best part: Excel supports your example and many other similar quality of programmers life use cases and has been for years if not decades (e.g. named ranges and tables). For some reason people don’t use them.
    • RodgerTheGreat 2y ago
      A downright comical number of analytics products are crude reimplementations of lesser-known Excel features. A rudimentary understanding of pivot tables or "goal seek" can be enough to blow minds even among an audience that has used Excel on a daily basis for decades. Spreadsheets, like word processors and presentation tools, are so omnipresent that organizations tend to assume their operation is absorbed through osmosis, and therefore fail to invest in training.
    • biddendidden 2y ago
      [dead]
  • thimabi 2y ago
    I guess when you add type safety and tests to an app like Excel, it becomes so much closer to programming languages that it makes more sense to ditch the app and just write code directly. Even today, complex logic in Excel is mostly done through VBA, JavaScript, Python and the like.
  • bcoates 2y ago
    There's PowerQuery, built into Excel. It can do some great stuff (love me some fuzzy join) but the ergonomics are apocalyptic. This is actually the root problem of trying to improve or extend Excel--it has a truly ancient, horribly broken sharing/ipc/embedding model that is integrated into everything and can't be easily fixed or worked around.
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  Obligatory Krazam: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI
• throwaway106382 2y ago
  I’ve only ever used Libre(open) Office Calc since I’ve never paid for or bothered to pirate office before. What can Excel do that Calc can’t? I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.
  • baq 2y ago
    I’ve used Excel and Calc and the short answer is ‘everything’. Excel is faster, more reliable and has a much bigger community. Calc is ok if you want to work with small spreadsheets and don’t care about the occasional bug.
    • nocman 2y ago
      not the parent, but 'everything' is a mostly unhelpful answer. A few important concrete examples would be much more interesting. In fairness, you did somewhat, but I would be interested in some more details.
      • baq 2y ago
        I mean this literally: Everything you can do in Calc, Excel is better at in either UX or performance, usually both. Even typing formulas in cells is snappier in Excel.
      • Cordiali 2y ago
        A very basic example, Calc doesn't have tables. That's enough for me to not want to use it, but there are probably a dozen of those for me.
      • max51 2y ago
        It's like asking what are the differences between Visual Studio and Notepad++. Literally >90% of the tools in Excel don't exist in Calc. And there are big ones in the list (eg. pivot table, vba macros, solver), not just small feature..
  • AnonC 2y ago
    I use Calc on my personal machine. > What can Excel do that Calc can’t? For one, a working copy paste. Seriously, I’ve lived with a copy paste bug in LibreOffice Calc (Windows) for years (it wasn’t yet fixed as of a few months ago). It will either paste an older copy or not paste anything even though I just hit Ctrl+C (sometimes multiple times) within Calc. This is one of the most irritating things about Calc. Fonts and formatting is another thing that Calc miserably fails at in relation to copy paste. Multiple cells will look very different even though the font, size, etc., will appear the same in the dropdowns below the menus (when these cells are in focus). LibreOffice Calc, in many ways, portrays the worst of what one would expect from an open source project (I say this as a supporter/donor of Document Foundation). The other part about what Excel can do that Calc can’t is that Microsoft (at least with the MS365 subscription version) has been adding more functions to improve older functions and features. I don’t remember everything, but SEQUENCE and XLOOKUP are two functions that come to mind on this aspect. LibreOffice Calc lags behind Excel on functions by several years. LibreOffice Calc, though it’s a lot newer/younger than Excel, also has ~weird~ different keyboard shortcuts compared to Excel (e.g. adding a new line within a cell is Ctrl+Enter whereas it’s Alt+Enter in Excel; there are many more like this). Nevertheless, I use Calc because I can’t bother to pay Microsoft and since Excel might be the only application that could be of value to me in its Office offerings (MS Word is total crap, PowerPoint isn’t as keyboard friendly as I’d like it to be, and Outlook is another total piece of crap).
• cendyne 2y ago
  There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.
  • onionisafruit 2y ago
    Soon after I started my first IT job, my boss had me fill out a spreadsheet with everybody’s local desktop password so we could do updates when they aren’t around. It was a very awkward week asking people for their passwords. That was almost 30 years ago, and I still remember a few people’s passwords.
    • grvbck 2y ago
      Then we had fiber (FTTH) installed in my building, the installation company delivering the routers wrote everybody's router username, password and SSID with a whiteboard marker on the outside of the door, "to make the installation easier for the technicians".
  • heraldgeezer 2y ago
    Still happens lol Some companies dont want to learn a new tool Or pay for a new tool like itglue/bitwarden/keeper
• terminalbraid 2y ago
  I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too. You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of "programming". However, due to whatever environment, desired or perceived skillsets (or limitations), other pressures, people stay and remain with that local tooling minimum for things that should have outgrown it. If you ever meet an office's "excel person" you instantly understand this phenomena.
  • MostlyStable 2y ago
    R is mostly benefiting from network effects. Everyone in the life sciences uses it (I think economists mostly use Statista and engineers/physicists seem to use a lot of MatLab?), which means that all the things that they need get R libraries (and blog posts explaining how to do them, and publications validating their use, etc.). And the way that academic scientists work mean that most of the downsides of R don't actually matter. I will completely agree with almost any list of deficiencies that you come up with for R. But I will disagree that almost anything on that list actually matters for an academic lab using it to conduct analyses. As for it's use outside of academia, I couldn't comment.
    • williamcotton 2y ago
      I much prefer ggplot over other options!
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    I'm an Excel person who is branching into PowerShell. Similar "no tools required" approach.
  • jpc0 2y ago
    I mean... I have some spreadsheets that are pretty complicated and almost certainly could be a fully fledged program but, well it's already there and I don't need to figure out whatever framework / library I need to present the data as a PDF, excel already does that... I 100% get the appeal of excel for many tasks and realistically when used as a tool it is extremely powerful and removes a lot of things (like how to display the data) out of what I need to care about.
• MostlyStable 2y ago
  I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files. Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.
  • fifilura 2y ago
    Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.
    • MostlyStable 2y ago
      I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.
      • fifilura 2y ago
        The finance department in a previous job rather undramatically moved over to Google Sheets from Excel after seeing the befits of the collaboration/online environment. They got some help by me for moving out the heavy stuff to SQL/BigQuery but that was also for the better. BigQuery and Sheets integrate very well these days so they could even use a Google sheet as a UI for the queries. Rows and columns, much better than any other web UI. (Yes I believe you are being silly)
        • deleted 2y ago
• coffeeshopgoth 2y ago
  Right on time for the Excel World Championships... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NP5FBB2G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NP5FBB2G0
• vl 2y ago
  This is unendurable, this article didn’t actually say what are the names of the babies! To describe entire process and then leave out the result is just bad journalism.
• mannyv 2y ago
  Excel is probably the most useful application ever made. Pretty much every professional services implementation and technical account management engagement is done via excel. For me, I've used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It's super easy at this point to see anything with it. It's well worth any price for sure. It's really the only reason I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I've used more than 2% of it.
  • grvbck 2y ago
    [flagged]
• xbmcuser 2y ago
  This is one of the things LLM's have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done. I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spreadsheets explained in easy to understand terms for comparably non tech users a lot of stuff became easy to do. As llm had detailed usually correct answers and suggestions. I would have learned my way to doing it anyway but LLM's brought the learning curve down from a few hours to a few min so was willing to just use libre office.
  • copperx 2y ago
    That's cool. I'm wondering if using an LLMs could make using Pandas or R as easy as Excel.
    • NBJack 2y ago
      I doubt that. Pandas is stupidly powerful... for raw data, experiments, and ML model training/inference. But in my experience it rapidly becomes an esoteric box at times when you need to get data back out of it.
  • ddingus 2y ago
    That is a great skill to have. When I set Win 11 or earlier version PCs for others, I always load up Void Tools "Everything" and then swing by FossHUB for the full set of tools. Libre Office, Inkscape, and many more all go on the machine. And then I explain what they just got and what it is worth. Almost everyone ends up being able to use the OSS tools. Doing this saves a ton of money!
    • heraldgeezer 2y ago
      Honestly for office just massgrave it The rest, yes I love OSS tools on Windows. But have fun when their important word docs get garbled (it's an example, do not come after me with some "uuuh acually word docs open fine now")
• 486sx33 2y ago
  Because I’m so used to excel, I really have a hard time using sheets, it’s different enough to be annoying and easy enough to export to xls to open in excel and do things the way I want to. One thing I’ve had success with lately is chat-gpt 4o to manipulate large sheets. Sometimes it is really dumb and ruins my data, so always keep the last iteration handy… Sometimes it does some really great things, especially comparing multiple excel files.
• wslh 2y ago
  Based on this, I'd love to brainstorm here on HN about what a next-generation Excel could look like, one that keeps Excel’s core strengths without expanding into database like features found in tools like Airtable. Here are a few ideas: 1. Clear Separation between UI/UX and Backend: By separating the user interface from backend processes—perhaps as a module or library—Excel could maintain its clean, familiar interface while supporting more complex calculations and data handling in the background. This concept is somewhat akin to “Microsoft Excel Services.” 2. Multi-Language Formula Support: Similar to how VSCode supports multiple programming languages, Excel could allow users to choose between languages for cell formulas. Many users are comfortable with the current formula syntax, but it feels outdated, and even Google Sheets has (obviously?) largely replicated this old model. Allowing for different languages, while keeping the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, could enable more advanced and flexible workflows. 3. Enhanced Data Types and Representations: Cells or groups of cells could support stronger data types, richer formatting, and custom representations, like embedded charts. 4. Integrated Data Connectivity: Excel could come with built-in tools to connect to external data sources and export data in structured formats, perhaps managed with an external orchestrator. I know you can do this with Excel and some other tools but I would like to just mark a cell and indicating that it can be consumed in a specific endpoint. 5. No artificial limits to the number of columns and rows.
  • kjellsbells 2y ago
    6? Explicit versioning of spreadsheets, eg a Commit to GitHub button. 365 saves continuously but doesnt have the mental step of making you record what changed. Along the same lines, diff for spreadsheets that supported diff-by-value and diff-by-formula. 7? Beef up the recommended pivot tables. Not to jump on the AI bandwagon, but any table that has Sales$ and dates is ripe for suggesting sales by qtr, week etc. Let the AI inspect the table and make suggestions. 8. Beef up the programmability. The Record Macro feature emits VBA but the code is very literal (eg it sees you move to row 12345, and records that, not understanding that what you mean is 'move to the last row') and the IDE is primitive. Fold in copilot experience to the IDE, modernize the UI, and allow macros to be integrated with github instead of buried in some personal.xlb file that is all too easy to lose.
• ChicagoDave 2y ago
  I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better. One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand. You will pry Excel from my cold dead hands.
  • zwarag 2y ago
    While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this. How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances 2. Year-over-year analysis 3. Category management 4. Historical tracking Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?
    • kenjackson 2y ago
      Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets are good for? I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you’re doing.
      • pixelatedindex 2y ago
        Maybe if you have millions of rows you might have trouble with excel. Other than that, from a data storage perspective an Excel is just a database that’s human readable.
        • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
          Not really. It generally won't have a schema. You generally can't write queries against it.
• ETH_start 2y ago
  40 years ago the spreadsheet was the killer app of the fledgling device known as the personal computer, and now it's an indelible part of many people's daily life.
• kjellsbells 2y ago
  Reading these comments, I think I might be a dinosaur, but Excel (native, Windows) has a really good keybindings UI (you press Alt, and all the key choices light up), and the ability to record actions as macros and then inspect the code is absolutely gold for automation. I know VBA is profoundly uncool and all that, but boy, if there was a better native IDE inside Excel with Copilot helping me along, I would be throwing money at Microsoft right now.
  • cmgbhm 2y ago
    There’s a lot of finish in the Microsoft products. Views are so much faster to pick settings in Excel. You can format tables and indent them (nested ledger) You can get higher information density. It’s always amazing to me to wade through “how to x” in Google and see 100s of people asking for years. Google docs and numbered headings is one of those.
  • eviks 2y ago
    The alt chords are the only good part of the keybinding UI, otherwise it's all bad unergonomic combos and difficult customization
• alwillis 2y ago
  I use Numbers for my day-to-day spreadsheet stuff, part of Apple's iWork suite with Pages and Keynote. The UI/UX is so much better than Excel's and you can export to .xlsx format. Don't get me wrong--there are some projects that require the functionality that Excel has. Using it gives me 90's software PTSD but sometimes you have no choice.
  • jimnotgym 2y ago
    And what do you do for a living may I ask? Accountant, Actuary, trader? I only ask if you are using some of the advanced features, which is where the others start to fall away. Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure
    • alwillis 2y ago
      > Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure Don't be fooled by the marketing—Numbers has 90% of Excel's core functions; it even had RegEx before Excel did. IMHO, Numbers UI/UX is dramatically better than Excel's. Of course, it doesn't have Excel's advanced features or access to plugins or to Python scripts. The users who need that know they need Excel… but you can go surprisingly far with Numbers. Like I originally said, there are some tasks where you absolutely need Excel.
      • jimnotgym 2y ago
        Does Numbers run well on a PC?
  • jpalawaga 2y ago
    I'm the opposite. I cannot stand Apple's productivity software, and I get irrationally mad when something tries to open those.
• bigjump 2y ago
  The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked! https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!
  • rezmason 2y ago
    You're cleared for takeoff: https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg
• jimnotgym 2y ago
  I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets. Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad. You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good. The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over 'proper' software, databases etc is portability and auditability. Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.
  • candiddevmike 2y ago
    I would temper your hot take. Nothing you described is a feature specific to Excel from what I can tell, and using Excel in front of an ERP is most likely an anti-pattern as the ERP is meant to handle reporting and authorization in a centralized way.
    • Etheryte 2y ago
      Nearly everyone who knows how to use a computer knows how to use Excel to some extent. That is a feature of Excel that pretty much no other software solution can bring to the table.
      • andyferris 2y ago
        I would contend that any user that can use Excel could pick up e.g. Google sheets instantly, especially in an audit capability where you want to scan the data (and view a couple formulae) rather than craft it from scratch.
        • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
• pxc 2y ago
  An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She's a programmer, so she could have used a wide range of tools but Excel was what she reached for and it evidently did the trick nicely. The thing that stands out to me in these stories is that spreadsheet programs are a (1) the most common site of programmability that features in anyone's lives, even non-programmer; and (2) for many tasks, spreadsheets sit at some kind of local optimum in a tradeoff between simplicity and power. (There's surely something for engineers and designers to learn from the second point.) It seems like a connection worth celebrating, between people like us and the mostly non-programming public— a little piece of overlap between two worlds.
• CamelCaseName 2y ago
  This is a very basic article compared to the conversation here. Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis. As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn't trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%. I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is. Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong. So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
  • ianand 2y ago
    > Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong. FWIW one my frustrations with Excel is how it does freezing of rows. I find Google's appraoch more intuitive. But the issues on computation I agree with (see my other comment on this post).
    • Andrex 2y ago
      As a point of data, I also find how Google Sheets handles frozen rows/columns more intuitive.
• WillAdams 2y ago
  It's unfortunate that folks haven't had the chance to try the various other alternatives --- Informix WingZ had quite nice charts, Lotus Improv was quite different, and only Quantrix has survived, but not many folks get to use it since its so expensive to license a seat. I wish the opensource Flexisheet would be reworked so that it would compile and run again.
  • nhatcher 2y ago
    FWIW, I am building another alternative. We are very, very, very far away from Excel. But TBH I think that's true for anything else that is not Excel or Google sheets. Zoho deserves a special mention and lots of other good folks have created fantastic things like rows ir grid.is
• theshrike79 2y ago
  The magic of Excel is that everyone has it and it does enough for most cases. Yes, some things could be done better with a separate application or custom software, but that requires approval and contracts etc. With Excel you can just build that crap yourself and share it or not.
• pdm55 2y ago
  Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story. The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan. In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise. More recent times. Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn't envy him his task. "Please, not just Excel." I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data. "Rinse-and-repeat Excel". I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this. And that's it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I'm thankful that I haven't had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.
  • PopAlongKid 2y ago
    >The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. There were millions of spreadsheet users by 1986, as VisiCalc was released in 1979[0] and similar programs like SuperCalc[1] were also in use. They were both ported to IBM PC and saw significant use in the corporate world prior to and including 1986. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc
• somat 2y ago
  I grew out of it. I started to really loath the spreadsheet data model. "it's a big bag of cells" was not really doing anything for me. I started wanting better data structures and programing environments to work on that data. For the data storage and basic calculations on that stored data role, I mainly use a relational database, most of what I wanted in a spreadsheet was row level security, that is, for my rows to stick together(one to many bad sorts I guess), and relational databases provided this in spades.
  • jhickok 2y ago
    I have never really been proficient in Excel and I've always sort of been drawn to Python+Pandas+DataWranglers, but I am sorta interested in Python for Excel when it is released for Mac. I'll at least give it a shot!
  • ysagal 2y ago
    Have you tried getgrist.com? It's a relational database that looks like a spreadsheet and has granular row level security. And also the language of formulas is Python.
• game_the0ry 2y ago
  I worked in finance professionally for 7 years before I started writing code for money, so I would say I am very familiar with the tool. For the specific set of problems it is designed to solve, its like shooting the best sniper rifle ever made -- point, calibrate, pull trigger, win. For any other problems outside of its scope, its like trying to break the world record for Nurburgring while driving a short bus.
• motohagiography 2y ago
  most people in tech don't get what Excel is imo. start with the idea that it's a fully featured virtual machine that uses a different interface metaphor than a command line or windowing. it's useful to think of it as an abstraction layer where business runs, it's where value is demonstrated. those user spreadsheets are computers/hosts/vms and I'd argue that's often the disconnect between what technologists think they are supporting and what users think should be supported. of course custom code is better at pretty much anything. I've been a unix user since the bsdi days and so to me spreadsheets are a cruel toy running in a blue tinted mental prison, but when you see excel as a different and sophisticated UX metaphor for a fully featured machine that the user uses for raw arithmetic computation, and as an alternative to a command line or a browser, it's much easier to respect. that's absolutely essential for understanding it and its users. the thing about excel is if you don't use it i guarantee you work for someone who does as the tabular metaphor is the system of the world. even if reality is more complex and needs more complex objects to model it, human beings ultimately organize around the contents of spreadsheets. hand wavy, but I don't know how else to tell developers and product people they need to take excel seriously.
  • skydhash 2y ago
    Most people do get that and why it's useful. But it's like ssh-ing into a vm to do anything in production. It works, but goes against any engineering principle we have. We write bespoke scripts and I think no one would begrudge anyone trying to do quick a quick computation on anything tabular. But then you got complicated business processes that are held together by spreadsheets and it's a nightmare scenario when you know how much people trust the computer. It's easy and fast, but we'd like some more reliability.
• cafard 2y ago
  It may well be on HN that I read so-and-so's rule: It doesn't matter what the users say they want, they want Excel. Gratitude and an upvote to the person who can attach a name and citation to the rule.
  • fancy_pantser 2y ago
    here ya go ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665282
• klausnrooster 2y ago
  See https://www.felienne.com/public-appearances https://www.felienne.com/public-appearances and ctrl-f for Excel. Especially the videos, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY . Then have a gander at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-bd212d27-1cd1-4321-a34a-ccbf254b8b67 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...
• analog31 2y ago
  I work adjacent to a mid sized engineering department that develops both hardware and software, for measurement equipment. The managers use Excel, as one might expect, although at this point it might be equally accurate to say "spreadsheets" generically. I'm not sure how many of them use advanced features that are unique to Excel. They will use the one with the least friction. With that said, Excel probably still has the most finely tuned UI. The traditional engineers use Excel. Very few of them program. The ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, have joined the software industry. The rest are pretty adamant that programming won't get the job done quicker or more reliably than Excel. The software engineers use Excel. They're good at whatever their role is within the software team, but they use Excel for the same kinds of short-term or one-off problem solving that everybody else uses it for. Do some spreadsheets get too big and unwieldy for their own good? Sure. But that would also be true if you let the managers and traditional engineers write their own code for solving the same kinds of problems. I know this because I write that kind of code. Nothing will ever bridge the gap between small and large projects, that exists in most mature organizations.
• sno6 2y ago
  Excel is great but there’s a large audience who would benefit from something simpler and more intuitive. That’s what we are trying to build at Klaro (klaroapp.com)
• Eggpants 2y ago
  My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators. I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat/lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set. I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations. A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing. Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on/off with color. Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone. I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.
• keithalewis 2y ago
  I wrote something to make it simple to embed C++ in Excel. It is useful for pushing business logic into platform independent code that can be integrated into back end production systems. One bonus is the original spreadsheet has unit tests vetted by the business users. https://github.com/xlladdins/xll https://github.com/xlladdins/xll
• johnea 2y ago
  Yea, people grow up with rashes on their butts too, stop glorifying this steaming pile of s/w doo doo...
• teleforce 2y ago
  Fun facts, when Excel was launched by both Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft back in 1985 at Tavern on the Green, New York, Excel has 16,384 rows and 256 columns, and now original Excel's rows now exactly matched the Excel's current columns of 16,384 (2^14). Another fun facts, on average people spent 10% of their working life using Excel.