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As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they
by cmbaus 14y ago
As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency.
I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
- memset 14y agoI used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!