4 ms·

> Can you give me an example of such advanced features? macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Off

by clows 1y ago

> Can you give me an example of such advanced features? macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises. > I'm sure this is trivial [...]. nope.

gloosx 1y ago
You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked. But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
- Philpax 1y ago
  Please don't make us link the infamous Dropbox HN comment ;)
  - gloosx 1y ago
    I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself. >There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features. this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
    - zchrykng 1y ago
      > I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself. Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
    - p_ing 1y ago
      SharePoint/OneDrive Lists can be directly edited in Excel. The Power platform can directly access/manipulate/transform Excel files in the cloud or on-prem via the Power BI Gateway. You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
- rescbr 1y ago
  So you do all this work, retrain other users, spend a not-so-trivial amount of time and money and risk breaking stuff, all for not paying $22 monthly per user? I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.

by clows 1y ago

gloosx 1y ago

You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked. But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)

Philpax 1y ago
Please don't make us link the infamous Dropbox HN comment ;)
- gloosx 1y ago
  I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself. >There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features. this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
  - zchrykng 1y ago
    > I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself. Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    SharePoint/OneDrive Lists can be directly edited in Excel. The Power platform can directly access/manipulate/transform Excel files in the cloud or on-prem via the Power BI Gateway. You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
rescbr 1y ago
So you do all this work, retrain other users, spend a not-so-trivial amount of time and money and risk breaking stuff, all for not paying $22 monthly per user? I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.