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Good luck finding someone under 30 that uses Office by choice though. That stuff matters.
by Touche 12y ago
Good luck finding someone under 30 that uses Office by choice though. That stuff matters.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI'm a software dev so I don't really have a need for Excel, but from what I've seen/heard from my friends in business and accounting, Excel is unparalleled in the spreadsheet game. Especially when it comes to advanced features like macros and forumlas.
- csandreasen 12y agoAs much as I hate the rest of Office, I have to agree that Excel is way ahead of any other spreadsheet software I've ever used. That's not to say it couldn't be dislodged by something better - there's definitely a niche without a decent solution somewhere between an Excel sheet loaded with convoluted VLOOKUPs and a writing something custom with an SQL interface to a database. I'd bet you could find a huge market for something with an interface like Excel but easily able to consistently parse/transform/create new tables.
- Nexxxeh 12y agoExcel gives non-programmers a Swiss Army Knife for dealing with numbers and/or lists. It's not as math as Mathmatica or Mathcad, it's not as databasey as SQL but for most people it's more than enough. It's enough for most people most of the time. Need to build a massive batch script to delete a load of specific files? You can use Excel and "concatenate" to build your batch file. Need to make a contacts list for your grandma, with clickable hyperlinks for Skype? Excel has you covered. Need to work out the expected electricity bill from the meter reading and the tariff listed on the website, then work out how much each person in the household should contribute? Excel will do just fine. Stock list? Piece of piss. You can even make a pie chart that looks like Pacman. While it's often not the best tool for the job, it's often the most flexible tool that's easy to use that will get the job done. I've just taught an 86-year-old lady how to use spreadsheets, covering basic formulas, advanced filtering and searching etc. It's intuitive and provides a good return for the learning curve.
- waps 12y agoPlus spreadsheets are a purely functional programming language : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1194878 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1194878
- bnolsen 12y agognumeric is excellent. ive seen far to many people trying to use a spreadsheet like a general document processor. just use a spreadsheet for what it's good at doing: operating on columns (or rows) of numbers!
- pjmlp 12y agoHow many do you want? Everyone I know uses it, regardless how they got it.
- lelandbatey 12y agoHey there. 20 year old. Office is pretty good for writing stuff, and I prefer the power I get with it over something like Google Docs. Additionally, most people I know prefer Office over Google Docs. However, I also use LaTeX when seriously trying to write documents, so I'm probably an outlier.
- andrewfong 12y agoUnder 30. The latest Office is actually pretty good. I prefer Google Docs for quick collaborative brainstorming, but for pretty much everything else, Office beats the pants off of Google Docs, QuickOffice, and Open/LibreOffice. Context: I've spent the last 4 years or so in law school or as a lawyer. It's a field where people are usually picky about formatting, citations, and cross-references, but aren't willing to learn something like LaTeX.
- drivingmenuts 12y agoY'all still using WordPerfect?
- _acme 12y agoNo. In my 6 years of practice at a large international law firm, I've never encountered any "peer" firm or otherwise that uses WordPerfect.
- calbear81 12y agoLove using Excel and will switch to a PC whenever I'm building a more complicated model. The Mac version is still much slower and Google Sheets is painful to use for anything other than simple tables.