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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

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
      Yeah. But then all your data lands at Google and now you’re at their mercy. I like my Excel offline thank you.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    I now I am probably part of a minority but I am totally lost with excel (and libreoffice calc). I used to export to csv and use perl whenever I had to manipulate data. These days I even import to an sqlite database and use either the sqlite cli (or ruby). Thanksfully I don't have to deal with excel files all too often.
- jimnotgym 2y ago
  Ha ha ha The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up? But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?
elmerfud 2y ago
Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply being a piece of software means that they could adapt it to do all kinds of things that are better fulfilled by a different tool. Just because they adapted it to make it a database and a spreadsheet hybrid thing doesn't mean it was also the right thing to do. It was the thing to do that made them money and have them capture market share. Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better. So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes. It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - elmerfud 2y ago
    To take your Hammer example it really depends on what you're doing. If the only thing you're doing is pounding framing nails then one framing hammer is generally suitable. If you need to pound framing nails and you need to do metal work and you need to do fine finish work you will need a number of different hammers to accomplish those jobs and have a good outcome in each task. Your argument is that Excel is fine at being the one hammer that can do absolutely everything as good as purpose-built software is. That is factually wrong. I know it tries to be and it's okay at being average at many of these tasks and if average is good enough for you then go ahead and do it. I for one choose to frame my house by using either a framing hammer or a power nailer that's made to drive framing nails. When I do my finish work I don't want mark up on my trim with big old Hammer marks from a framing hammer, so I choose to use a hammer that's made for finish nails or a brad nail gun or another tool that's made to do it so it looks professional. You are welcome to live in a house that is built like trash and is marred up with "apprentice marks" as they're called. I will choose to be the master Craftsman.
oneplane 2y ago
Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small. In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment. The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone. Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong) But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences. Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is. You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming. If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?
- foobiekr 2y ago
  neither of those are useful for the next stage of analysis.
  - LikesPwsh 2y ago
    Csv is much more useful than Excel. Pdf is much less useful.
    - afiori 2y ago
      can you make graphs in a CSV?
      - fuzzfactor 2y ago
        Not exactly, I like to graph "xSV" data as it is streaming in to the PC, with processing before displaying and filling the cells with the filtered data. You can choose which functions you want to apply before data hits the cells and let the cells do their magic after that. Pretty much a real-time live graph, other than a little latency. After data collection (or during), then output can be made in any format you would like. In addition to what anybody would want to print right off the spreadsheet. The XLS(X) file forms a database and UI, contains a copy of the input macros and output macros, and you save the whole thing every time which backs it all up (over and over and over again) in a form that anybody can open anywhere with a PC that only has Windows & Office. And whoever opens it will be right up to speed as good as they can be with whatever abilities they have using Excel alone.
    - 2y ago
gus_massa 2y ago
I'm using Google Sheets instead of Excel since a few years, and the only feature I miss is Solver.
- Andrex 2y ago
  It's almost too easy to hit up https://sheets.new https://sheets.new whenever I get an idea. Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer. I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time. https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png I don't think Excel offers anything like this.
  - kjellsbells 2y ago
    I think your computer may have problems. I have a 5 year old Dell Latitude and Excel loads with a new sheet in under 2 seconds from cold. I have the excel on my taskbar so even triggering the launch is Win+2 and quick. Excel on Mac is another ball of wax though. Bit of a dog, that.
    - nikau 2y ago
      Likely a corporate pc with 20 different security products slowing it down
whall6 2y ago
This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures. If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it. One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.
- chaps 2y ago
  Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.
  - actionablefiber 2y ago
    I think it's important to think of Excel as a tool for modelling reality and not a tool for changing it. IMO Excel should not be producing data feeds that other tools expect real time access to, nor should it make API calls that mutate state on other platforms.
  - goodlinks 2y ago
    Cheeky response.. It would take a 1 year project and 5 devs to replace what one finance person created in a day. Then when it didnt work complain the SME got the requirements wrong. Im being silly but as a dev i hate the hate for excel, though i know from years of experience that its also a nightmare.
  - mp05 2y ago
    I'm sure they were glad they had you to fix their problems!
  - worewood 2y ago
    At that point why not code something using the Interop APIs to programatically interface with the spreadsheet? It's a PITA to code but it works.
  - 2y ago
Karellen 2y ago
Excel spreadsheets are auditable? If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them? https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disastrous-consequences-yet-we-keep-making-the-same-mistakes-219356 https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa... https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+errors&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Financials are auditable. Code is auditable. The fact that something can be audited doesn't mean it will be, or will be done well if done.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much. In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.
  - remus 2y ago
    While it's true that an auditor can look at an excel spreadsheet, my experience is that they'll never really understand what's happening for anything more than the most basic spreadsheets. It's far too easy to build a spreadsheet that's completely inscrutable, and you end up with an audit that's very shallow.
    - ryoshu 2y ago
      That's generally by design.
      - 2y ago
nradov 2y ago
And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good enough" for basic, simple stuff but for anything more it's a real productivity killer.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  This. I had similar experiences with LibreOffice. It can choke on what you'd think were pretty mundane and reasonably sized things. I imported a CSV file of 15K lines once and it used all available memory on my PC doing it. The optimization that goes into Excel is one of those "unsung hero" things that doesn't get a lot of glory but it is clutch day in and day out.
- Affric 2y ago
  I worked in a place where excel was used for ad-hoc calculations. We became a Google shop. Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.
- ianand 2y ago
  Google Sheets does struggle past a certain size. For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel. In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization. That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson. I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).
  - 2y ago
m463 2y ago
I remember my attempts to use numbers on a mac to pull up some spreadsheets. It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW. Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.
- 1_1xdev1 2y ago
  It's unbearably slow even opening and filtering a small CSV file (100s of rows).
Dylan16807 2y ago
I need you to explain why those other tools are like notepad instead of just another IDE. Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct. (And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)
- Krssst 2y ago
  And if my IDE made it harder for me so save a file to it could nudge me into saving it into its cloud I would definitely run to other IDEs.
chaostheory 2y ago
The real problem isn’t with Excel itself. The problem is VBA and even Microsoft has been trying to kill it with JavaScript and future python support. I don’t feel that even MS can kill VBA since it’s so ubiquitous on Excel into the day that the majority of users transition to Excel online.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  If MSFT are serious about this, they need to make migration easier. Right now they half heartedly point you at javascript and excel plugins and walk away. When Record Macro gives you the option of recording in JavaScript, not VBA, then we'll talk.
- rescbr 2y ago
  It would be easier if they simply port their VBA runtime to WASM and call it a day.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  What is wrong with VBA? Aside from a few syntax quirks, like no short circuits in if statements, it is a very easy language to learn and use. And, the syntax hinting (IntelliSense?) is incredible.
croes 2y ago
Excel problems and errors are everywhere too. Especially when data imports are necessary. I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets. And people are aware of it but they don't know where the faults are and need to go forward anyway. So they must act as if nothing could be wrong, and if something does come up later on it can be treated as a complete surprise to everyone concerned. With that kind of acting, how about how far the bar has been lowered on even more critical decisions? :\
ksec 2y ago
I keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows. You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.
- dartos 2y ago
  “Entrenched” isn’t the same as “very good”
iancmceachern 2y ago
Its the same for many aspects of engineering, equally applies. Thank you
mr_toad 2y ago
The auditors use it, the CFO expects it, it’s all the interns know. These are reasons to have to use it, not to like it. At best it’s an arranged marriage, at worst it’s Stockholme syndrome.
throw10920 2y ago
[flagged]
iwontberude 2y ago
So by your logic, if the entire audit world used Numbers, you would be using Numbers. That isn’t remotely close to the rationale for why we don’t code BASIC in Notepad and is probably the reason why people here find Excel to be a less than ideal choice. We use the right tool for the job, not the tool that all of the industry uses because we would be screwed otherwise.
wjnc 2y ago
This hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.
bulubulu 2y ago
10 years ago I joined a consulting company as a data science intern. I arrived at work with my MacBook. I learned about excel in courses but had never used in my daily life: I use csv and SQLite for "data-heavy" cases and Numbers for intuitive cases (never coded inside it). When someone shares an excel sheet with me, I open with Numbers with no problem. On day 1 I realized my work was to deal with several excel sheets of 10~50MB, with huge amount of VBA scripts, rule-based highlighting, charts... They even wrote an internally used extension for those files. Numbers could not handle and crashed. I need Excel. I asked if I could borrow a PC laptop from the company, no, that's not for interns. I need to bring my own device. I asked if they would pay for Microsoft Office to get installed on my personal MacBook. The answer was obvious, what are you thinking? I had to manage to get Excel for myself, while the full salary they paid me was not enough to cover a license. I left consulting after that experience and end up working as a "real" data scientist. Nothing like that happened ever. I collaborate with colleagues using different IDEs/editors everyday. If an accountant joins us and tells me notepad is all you need, I would highly respect his choice and continue with my editor. We don't need to argue, our codebase is not locked in any tools.

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
    Yeah. But then all your data lands at Google and now you’re at their mercy. I like my Excel offline thank you.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I now I am probably part of a minority but I am totally lost with excel (and libreoffice calc). I used to export to csv and use perl whenever I had to manipulate data. These days I even import to an sqlite database and use either the sqlite cli (or ruby). Thanksfully I don't have to deal with excel files all too often.
jimnotgym 2y ago
Ha ha ha The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up? But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?

elmerfud 2y ago

Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply being a piece of software means that they could adapt it to do all kinds of things that are better fulfilled by a different tool. Just because they adapted it to make it a database and a spreadsheet hybrid thing doesn't mean it was also the right thing to do. It was the thing to do that made them money and have them capture market share. Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better. So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes. It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
[flagged]
- elmerfud 2y ago
  To take your Hammer example it really depends on what you're doing. If the only thing you're doing is pounding framing nails then one framing hammer is generally suitable. If you need to pound framing nails and you need to do metal work and you need to do fine finish work you will need a number of different hammers to accomplish those jobs and have a good outcome in each task. Your argument is that Excel is fine at being the one hammer that can do absolutely everything as good as purpose-built software is. That is factually wrong. I know it tries to be and it's okay at being average at many of these tasks and if average is good enough for you then go ahead and do it. I for one choose to frame my house by using either a framing hammer or a power nailer that's made to drive framing nails. When I do my finish work I don't want mark up on my trim with big old Hammer marks from a framing hammer, so I choose to use a hammer that's made for finish nails or a brad nail gun or another tool that's made to do it so it looks professional. You are welcome to live in a house that is built like trash and is marred up with "apprentice marks" as they're called. I will choose to be the master Craftsman.

oneplane 2y ago

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small. In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment. The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone. Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong) But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences. Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is. You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.

nuancebydefault 2y ago

The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming. If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?

foobiekr 2y ago
neither of those are useful for the next stage of analysis.
- LikesPwsh 2y ago
  Csv is much more useful than Excel. Pdf is much less useful.
  - afiori 2y ago
    can you make graphs in a CSV?
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      Not exactly, I like to graph "xSV" data as it is streaming in to the PC, with processing before displaying and filling the cells with the filtered data. You can choose which functions you want to apply before data hits the cells and let the cells do their magic after that. Pretty much a real-time live graph, other than a little latency. After data collection (or during), then output can be made in any format you would like. In addition to what anybody would want to print right off the spreadsheet. The XLS(X) file forms a database and UI, contains a copy of the input macros and output macros, and you save the whole thing every time which backs it all up (over and over and over again) in a form that anybody can open anywhere with a PC that only has Windows & Office. And whoever opens it will be right up to speed as good as they can be with whatever abilities they have using Excel alone.
  - 2y ago

gus_massa 2y ago

I'm using Google Sheets instead of Excel since a few years, and the only feature I miss is Solver.

Andrex 2y ago
It's almost too easy to hit up https://sheets.new https://sheets.new whenever I get an idea. Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer. I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time. https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png I don't think Excel offers anything like this.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  I think your computer may have problems. I have a 5 year old Dell Latitude and Excel loads with a new sheet in under 2 seconds from cold. I have the excel on my taskbar so even triggering the launch is Win+2 and quick. Excel on Mac is another ball of wax though. Bit of a dog, that.
  - nikau 2y ago
    Likely a corporate pc with 20 different security products slowing it down

whall6 2y ago

This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures. If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it. One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.

chaps 2y ago
Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.
- actionablefiber 2y ago
  I think it's important to think of Excel as a tool for modelling reality and not a tool for changing it. IMO Excel should not be producing data feeds that other tools expect real time access to, nor should it make API calls that mutate state on other platforms.
- goodlinks 2y ago
  Cheeky response.. It would take a 1 year project and 5 devs to replace what one finance person created in a day. Then when it didnt work complain the SME got the requirements wrong. Im being silly but as a dev i hate the hate for excel, though i know from years of experience that its also a nightmare.
- mp05 2y ago
  I'm sure they were glad they had you to fix their problems!
- worewood 2y ago
  At that point why not code something using the Interop APIs to programatically interface with the spreadsheet? It's a PITA to code but it works.
- 2y ago

Karellen 2y ago

Excel spreadsheets are auditable? If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them? https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disastrous-consequences-yet-we-keep-making-the-same-mistakes-219356 https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa... https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+errors&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Financials are auditable. Code is auditable. The fact that something can be audited doesn't mean it will be, or will be done well if done.
MegaDeKay 2y ago
Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much. In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.
- remus 2y ago
  While it's true that an auditor can look at an excel spreadsheet, my experience is that they'll never really understand what's happening for anything more than the most basic spreadsheets. It's far too easy to build a spreadsheet that's completely inscrutable, and you end up with an audit that's very shallow.
  - ryoshu 2y ago
    That's generally by design.
    - 2y ago

nradov 2y ago

And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good enough" for basic, simple stuff but for anything more it's a real productivity killer.

MegaDeKay 2y ago
This. I had similar experiences with LibreOffice. It can choke on what you'd think were pretty mundane and reasonably sized things. I imported a CSV file of 15K lines once and it used all available memory on my PC doing it. The optimization that goes into Excel is one of those "unsung hero" things that doesn't get a lot of glory but it is clutch day in and day out.
Affric 2y ago
I worked in a place where excel was used for ad-hoc calculations. We became a Google shop. Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.
ianand 2y ago
Google Sheets does struggle past a certain size. For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel. In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization. That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson. I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).
- 2y ago

m463 2y ago

I remember my attempts to use numbers on a mac to pull up some spreadsheets. It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW. Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.

1_1xdev1 2y ago
It's unbearably slow even opening and filtering a small CSV file (100s of rows).

Dylan16807 2y ago

I need you to explain why those other tools are like notepad instead of just another IDE. Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct. (And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)

Krssst 2y ago
And if my IDE made it harder for me so save a file to it could nudge me into saving it into its cloud I would definitely run to other IDEs.

chaostheory 2y ago

The real problem isn’t with Excel itself. The problem is VBA and even Microsoft has been trying to kill it with JavaScript and future python support. I don’t feel that even MS can kill VBA since it’s so ubiquitous on Excel into the day that the majority of users transition to Excel online.

kjellsbells 2y ago
If MSFT are serious about this, they need to make migration easier. Right now they half heartedly point you at javascript and excel plugins and walk away. When Record Macro gives you the option of recording in JavaScript, not VBA, then we'll talk.
rescbr 2y ago
It would be easier if they simply port their VBA runtime to WASM and call it a day.
throwaway2037 2y ago
What is wrong with VBA? Aside from a few syntax quirks, like no short circuits in if statements, it is a very easy language to learn and use. And, the syntax hinting (IntelliSense?) is incredible.

croes 2y ago

Excel problems and errors are everywhere too. Especially when data imports are necessary. I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets. And people are aware of it but they don't know where the faults are and need to go forward anyway. So they must act as if nothing could be wrong, and if something does come up later on it can be treated as a complete surprise to everyone concerned. With that kind of acting, how about how far the bar has been lowered on even more critical decisions? :\

ksec 2y ago

I keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows. You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.

dartos 2y ago
“Entrenched” isn’t the same as “very good”

iancmceachern 2y ago

Its the same for many aspects of engineering, equally applies. Thank you

mr_toad 2y ago

The auditors use it, the CFO expects it, it’s all the interns know. These are reasons to have to use it, not to like it. At best it’s an arranged marriage, at worst it’s Stockholme syndrome.

throw10920 2y ago

[flagged]

iwontberude 2y ago

So by your logic, if the entire audit world used Numbers, you would be using Numbers. That isn’t remotely close to the rationale for why we don’t code BASIC in Notepad and is probably the reason why people here find Excel to be a less than ideal choice. We use the right tool for the job, not the tool that all of the industry uses because we would be screwed otherwise.

wjnc 2y ago

This hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.

bulubulu 2y ago

10 years ago I joined a consulting company as a data science intern. I arrived at work with my MacBook. I learned about excel in courses but had never used in my daily life: I use csv and SQLite for "data-heavy" cases and Numbers for intuitive cases (never coded inside it). When someone shares an excel sheet with me, I open with Numbers with no problem. On day 1 I realized my work was to deal with several excel sheets of 10~50MB, with huge amount of VBA scripts, rule-based highlighting, charts... They even wrote an internally used extension for those files. Numbers could not handle and crashed. I need Excel. I asked if I could borrow a PC laptop from the company, no, that's not for interns. I need to bring my own device. I asked if they would pay for Microsoft Office to get installed on my personal MacBook. The answer was obvious, what are you thinking? I had to manage to get Excel for myself, while the full salary they paid me was not enough to cover a license. I left consulting after that experience and end up working as a "real" data scientist. Nothing like that happened ever. I collaborate with colleagues using different IDEs/editors everyday. If an accountant joins us and tells me notepad is all you need, I would highly respect his choice and continue with my editor. We don't need to argue, our codebase is not locked in any tools.