3 ms·
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was alre
by pasbesoin 13y ago
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then.
It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
- e12e 13y agoIt's a shame the "scheme in a grid"-project apparently is dead: http://siag.nu/ http://siag.nu/ (At least it's not trivial to get it to compile on a modern Linux distro as far as I can tell...). Not that it's really a replacement for excel for all users, but it was an interesting package.
- nawitus 13y agoWhat are the limitations of OpenOffice Calc compared to Excel and 10 year old Excel?
- CrLf 13y agoDon't know how OO Calc compares to Excel today, but I stopped using it after having an unfixed issue(1) open for a few years that made it impossible to produce a simple line graph with more than about 2000 points without slowing down the program to a halt, whereas Excel didn't even break a sweat. These are the limitations of Excel alternatives. They look nice on the outside, but fail to understand that users don't use them just for the simple stuff. It is well known that Excel is what really powers many companies, and these are often absurdly complex. (1) OO Calc insisted on drawing an x-axis label for every single point in a graph, on every redraw.
- davidgerard 13y agoShitty cell storage model - it models sheets as individual cells rather than as columns. This makes everything fat and sloooow. Kohei Yoshida is fixing this for LibreOffice, and Calc should get much faster in 4.2. Not as fast as Excel. LO Basic is not VBA. This is important when people's stuff is written in VBA.
- analog31 13y agoSlow, dog slow. I've tried Open / Libre Office on both Windows and Linux targets. A benchmark: Create a couple columns of, say, 10000 x/y values, and see how long it takes to create a basic scatter plot. Also, I've noticed that the user interface of Excel is a lot more polished. For instance it's more forgiving of exactly where I put the mouse pointer before clicking -- valuable for me because I get severe eyestrain headaches whenever I have to look too closely at the screen for too long.