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Here's some visual illustrations of why spreadsheets don't work well for organizational use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttu1JNgRck https://www.youtu

by howsta 11y ago

Here's some visual illustrations of why spreadsheets don't work well for organizational use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttu1JNgRck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttu1JNgRck Joel Spolsky also has a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html "What was I talking about? Oh yeah... most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations."

Ntrails 11y ago
On the other end I work in a company where excel is often used as a "development" platform, internal tools, VBA codebases etc etc. It's terrifying to see what a well intentioned mathematician can do with Excel, VBA, and 50meg of data. (Mostly just create a spreadsheet that crashes a lot tbh). Excel is used for a great many things, lists, calculations, analysis, charts, storage, and all of the possible mixtures of the two.