5 ms·

Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universitie

by puttycat 10mo ago

Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)

throw03172019 10mo ago
I just open them in Google Docs/Slides and then export later to the original format after edits. I’m sure it’s not feature complete but it’s good enough!
- ok123456 10mo ago
  This will ruin the formatting randomly. I would not do this if you're working on a deadline.
hypeatei 10mo ago
"is there any reason to use Office other than <literally every profession using it>?" No, I don't think so. I either sail the high seas or subscribe for a month or two when job searching then toss it when I'm done.
EvanAnderson 10mo ago
For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features. For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.
bix6 10mo ago
Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
- flakeoil 10mo ago
  If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    If you think spreadsheets aren’t used in serious finance, you’re going to be very disappointed if you ever have to work with that world.
    - noosphr 10mo ago
      My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
      - WorldMaker 10mo ago
        An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results. If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
        10mo ago
wongarsu 10mo ago
I'd still consider Excel best in class
- benterix 10mo ago
  While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version. You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
  - layer8 10mo ago
    I wish standalone versions were still standard, but the latest Excel versions have been adding really useful features in the core formula language.
munchbunny 10mo ago
In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers. Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.
donatj 10mo ago
As a home user and a Mac user, I haven't needed Office in well over 15 years given iWork and Google Docs. My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.
sneak 10mo ago
Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing. Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
richardlblair 10mo ago
I agree that Word has a million replacements. Hell, I usually just roll with a markdown file. But nothing beats excel or power point.
adabyron 10mo ago
Excel has amazing super powers. PowerPoint is underrated. For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
Aurornis 10mo ago
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
- rawbot 10mo ago
  > Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    When all you know is Hammer... I agree and you'd be surprised at the response when I showed some of them how to do it in python numpy.
    - acidburnNSA 10mo ago
      I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
      - esafak 10mo ago
        Dinosaurs gonna dinosaur. Teach his kids about the virtues of source control and testability, and the problem will be resolved in the next generation.
lousken 10mo ago
Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.
Oleksa_dr 10mo ago
Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot. I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases. Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks. PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story). PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.
- hu3 10mo ago
  Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning. About Python vs Excel: Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because: - it's hard to version control/diff - it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells - it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
  - Oleksa_dr 10mo ago
    > - it's hard to version control/diff As I mentioned, this is only prototyping. After that, we move on to implementation in code, knowing what we want to see in the end and understanding the nuances of the data itself. > - it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells No one is entering anything into the cells, please reread the message. > - it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git And that's what I said above. That it takes longer. Why use git/python when I can do it in a few clicks and quickly see a visual representation at every step? > In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess. Another sentence that shows once again that you haven't read what was written.

Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)

throw03172019 10mo ago

I just open them in Google Docs/Slides and then export later to the original format after edits. I’m sure it’s not feature complete but it’s good enough!

ok123456 10mo ago
This will ruin the formatting randomly. I would not do this if you're working on a deadline.

hypeatei 10mo ago

"is there any reason to use Office other than <literally every profession using it>?" No, I don't think so. I either sail the high seas or subscribe for a month or two when job searching then toss it when I'm done.

EvanAnderson 10mo ago

For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features. For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.

bix6 10mo ago

Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?

flakeoil 10mo ago
If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  If you think spreadsheets aren’t used in serious finance, you’re going to be very disappointed if you ever have to work with that world.
  - noosphr 10mo ago
    My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
    - WorldMaker 10mo ago
      An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results. If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
      - 10mo ago

wongarsu 10mo ago

I'd still consider Excel best in class

benterix 10mo ago
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version. You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
- layer8 10mo ago
  I wish standalone versions were still standard, but the latest Excel versions have been adding really useful features in the core formula language.

munchbunny 10mo ago

In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers. Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.

donatj 10mo ago

As a home user and a Mac user, I haven't needed Office in well over 15 years given iWork and Google Docs. My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.

sneak 10mo ago

Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing. Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?

richardlblair 10mo ago

I agree that Word has a million replacements. Hell, I usually just roll with a markdown file. But nothing beats excel or power point.

adabyron 10mo ago

Excel has amazing super powers. PowerPoint is underrated. For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.

Aurornis 10mo ago

Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.

rawbot 10mo ago
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
- reactordev 10mo ago
  When all you know is Hammer... I agree and you'd be surprised at the response when I showed some of them how to do it in python numpy.
  - acidburnNSA 10mo ago
    I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
    - esafak 10mo ago
      Dinosaurs gonna dinosaur. Teach his kids about the virtues of source control and testability, and the problem will be resolved in the next generation.

lousken 10mo ago

Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.

Oleksa_dr 10mo ago

Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot. I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases. Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks. PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story). PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.

hu3 10mo ago
Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning. About Python vs Excel: Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because: - it's hard to version control/diff - it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells - it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
- Oleksa_dr 10mo ago
  > - it's hard to version control/diff As I mentioned, this is only prototyping. After that, we move on to implementation in code, knowing what we want to see in the end and understanding the nuances of the data itself. > - it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells No one is entering anything into the cells, please reread the message. > - it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git And that's what I said above. That it takes longer. Why use git/python when I can do it in a few clicks and quickly see a visual representation at every step? > In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess. Another sentence that shows once again that you haven't read what was written.