[HN Gopher] Excel Never Dies ___________________________________________________________________ Excel Never Dies Author : andriodsheep Score : 130 points Date : 2022-08-04 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.notboring.co) (TXT) w3m dump (www.notboring.co) | hermitcrab wrote: | Massive companies are run off dodgy Excel spreadsheets. I make my | living from 3 completely different items of software (seating | planner, task planner, data transformation). I'm sure Excel is | the main competitor for all 3. The whole of western civilization | might collapse if Excel were to suddenly disappear. | qsort wrote: | At least 50% of my day job could be described as "replace some | guy's Excel file that got out of hand". I'm not even mad, I'll | die before excel does. | tomcam wrote: | This piece is worth reading, especially if you have said ever | heard anyone utter a statement along the lines of "Libre Office | does everything but Microsoft office can do". I use and regularly | contribute to Libre Office and haven't used Microsoft office for | years, but I am under no illusion that the former can replace the | ladder in any corporation over 10 people or so. There are | millions of business processes depending on its exact behavior in | ways you would never dream of, and until competitors can emulate | that behavior exactly they simply don't have a chance in | government or a big business settings | unosama wrote: | I've always hated excel. I'd much rather use R or Python. My | first job used an Excel macro to automate tasks in a DOS emulator | for some legacy software. It would take days to complete and | would regularly crash. As they say, if all you have is a hammer | everything looks like a nail. | civilized wrote: | Give me a slow, brittle, complicated, poorly documented app | written in X by a bunch of people who have long since left the | company, and I'll show you a way to make a person hate X. | | It doesn't matter what X is. | | And it's a shame, because improving or replacing those legacy | X's can be a big opportunity, if the person is set up to seize | it in the right way. | driscoll42 wrote: | I mean, but that same measure, you're advocating using R/Python | as a hammer for everything. Python/R are great languages and | tools, so is Excel, all three can be used in fantastic or awful | ways. | gregwebs wrote: | I am loving using coda.io rather than Excel for simple data and | documentation needs. | whatever1 wrote: | I can open a 20 year old excel file on a random pc and it will | run perfectly. | | I will be able to reproduce results and inspect the exact | equations generating these. | | Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever) | | As a fresh grad I used to hate excel, but now I can totally see | why it will never die. | thrown_22 wrote: | >Try that with 20yo code (python,c++ whatever) | | I regularly compile 35 year old C code. | | Standards are great like that. | whatever1 wrote: | I fail to compile 1 year old code if I don't have the exact | compiler and library versions that the program required at | the time of development. | thrown_22 wrote: | You should write better code. | | Excel breaks between versions silently. One of my first | jobs out of university was to build a pipeline of excel | spreadsheet to ensure they were run in the version of excel | and windows they were created in. You could not guarantee | that you would get the same results otherwise. This was a | slight problem for the brokerage I was working at since it | had lost them a few million dollars recently. | pagade wrote: | Every non-trivial enterprise software project eventually need to | add support for upload and download of Excel files. | daveslash wrote: | " _But there's one software product born in 1985, before many of | us were even a twinkle in our parents' eye_ " ~ I feel personally | attacked. /s | mulmen wrote: | In 1985 I was the cause of sleep deprivation. Pretty much the | opposite of a twinkle. | blahedo wrote: | > _SaaS has replaced discrete sales as the go-to business model | for software because it's better for the customer, ..._ | | What. | | Does the author actually believe this? Every single example of a | company that switched from something I could buy to making me | rent it instead has ended up costing me more money and given me a | worse product that is constantly at risk of > _poof_ < | disappearing if the company goes under or just decides they feel | like EOLing it. | | I'll totally buy the rest of the quoted sentence (e.g. about | recurring revenue) but the part I quoted above is absolute arrant | nonsense. | adepressedthrow wrote: | I recently sat down and built something more complicated than | simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be | a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in | several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an | ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that | ID and presents it to you. | | I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting | capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the | shape of your data in advance. (I was using Google Sheets, but I | don't think Excel would have been much different). For example, | it is very non-intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all | the rows in another sheet that match this rule, and once you do | that, since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is | difficult to then operate on that data without filling your | formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows. | | I realize most people don't have the luxury or skills, but I | quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for | this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and | windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet. | | After this experience, I can't help but wonder if Excel and | spreadsheets largely exist due to pre-existing knowledge about | how to use them, or if this is _actually_ the best way for non- | programming minded people to solve these problems. | jsmith99 wrote: | > it is very non intuitive to write a formula that retrieves | all the rows in another sheet that match this rule | | You can retrieve an entire range of data with a single formula | in either excel or Google sheets. The formula is caller FILTER | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f... | adepressedthrow wrote: | That's exactly what I did. Now separate out some columns and | perform some additional transformation on that FILTERed data. | Can you do it without repeating yourself (duplicating the | FILTER statement, or any of the other transformations you | need to do, besides just filling down a column). Can you | perform these transformations only on the row height of the | data, and not have extra rows with broken formulas? | | I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if the functionality to | do the above does exist, but for all of my searching I | couldn't find it. | jerry1979 wrote: | >I was horrified to find that even with the supporting | scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around | knowing the shape of your data in advance. | | Just record yourself finding the bottom of the data set (Ctrl + | down arrow), then take a moment to make the code work in | relative terms instead of absolute terms. | adepressedthrow wrote: | What do you mean by this? What am I "recording" as the bottom | of the data set? | | My point was that it is very hard to have a dynamic number of | rows feed a proportionate dynamic number of rows. Scripting | makes it much simpler, but at least with Google Sheet's | scripting, the API seemed pretty lacking for that processing | (in the very least, it's very slow, since it's running as a | very constrained shared resource). | _dain_ wrote: | Can you give a more detailed description of what you were | trying? I can't know for sure, but it sounds like Excel can | easily handle what you've described, if you use it right. | | >the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your | data in advance. | | How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your | data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or | your JSON schema, etc. | | >(I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have | been much different). | | It would have been very different, because Excel has tables and | Powerquery and Google Sheets doesn't. | | >since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult | to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down | for some indeterminate number of rows. | | Were you using dynamic array formulae? They can handle the old | problem of needing to fill down formulae to an arbitrary depth. | Or again, tables. | | Programmers routinely underestimate Excel. Unlike most | Microsoft products, it has improved year on year over the past | few decades. There are heaps of great power-user features they | keep introducing. The skill ceiling is very high .. not as high | as proper software engineering, but still damned high. | | It also really annoys me when I see Linux/FOSS partisans tell | Windows normies "oh you can do everything you can do in Excel | in LibreOffice Calc" -- _no you fucking well cannot._ (And I | use Linux on my personal computers full time). | Jtsummers wrote: | Google Sheets is pretty basic compared to Excel in terms of the | kinds of data analysis and queries it permits (without dropping | into another language). Excel added tables over a decade ago | that allow for some very useful and much cleaner query and data | analysis stuffs in straight Excel. Then there are power queries | and pivot tables, not sure how long those two have been around | but last I used Google Sheets it had nothing like either. | | My point being, don't judge spreadsheets by Google Sheets. | Actually use Excel and you'll see a much more capable system | and get a better understanding of why people (particularly non- | programmers in business settings) stick with it. | | EDIT: Pivot tables are in Google Sheets, so either I missed | them before or they were added after I last gave it a serious | look. My google-fu is not discovering the date they were added. | dima_vm wrote: | Not sure what you mean by "power queries", but Google Sheets | support SQL queries. | | Would be easier to see on an example. | _dain_ wrote: | PowerQuery. It's a tool built into Excel. It's a GUI that | wraps an almost purely-functional DSL designed for ETL and | data munging, called the M language. You can either use the | GUI or write the code directly. It has first class | functions and closures and normies are programming in it. | It's great. More people should know about it. | | Btw it's kind of funny seeing so many HN users, many of | whom must be working on software that competes with Excel | either directly or indirectly, who are so unknowing of the | full capabilities of Excel, capabilities that are the bread | and butter of any e.g. financial analyst, or logistics | manager, or any smart non-programmer white collar worker. | Maybe this "hacker repulsion field" is the secret of its | dominance -- you can't compete with it if you never learn | what it can do. | adepressedthrow wrote: | Your aside is exactly why I wanted to use a spreadsheet. | It's the only tool that has that market penetration for | non-programmers, and I wanted to see what made it tick. | It seems like that may have backfired by not using Excel, | however. | apancik wrote: | Excel has some functionality that Google Sheets are missing | that is used in this particular use case. More specifically, it | has a primitive called Table. After you set up your data as | Tables, you can then reference whole columns as Table1[Column1] | and it also fills your formulas down as you add more rows. | | I don't want to defend Excel too much, as it is not ideal in | many ways. Nevertheless, over time, I found myself using it | more and more to prototype and visualize data. With magic | features like Pivot charts, Flash fill, and Data tables you can | hammer out a one-off "app" in a matter of minutes. | adepressedthrow wrote: | Interesting. It definitely seems like that would fix a lot of | my issues, which prompts the question of why Google hasn't | built this functionality | ghaff wrote: | Google has, for better or worse (and I'd argue usually for | better), created a 90-95% product across | Word/Sheets/Slides. Every now and then I run into | limitations but the sparseness is mostly a win. That said, | every now and then I run into a limitation (perhaps | especially with Excel) that I have to either work around or | use the Microsoft product. | smt88 wrote: | The problems you mentioned are solved by Excel using tables, | which are named, variable in size, and can be referenced by | column names instead of addresses. | | Tables can also be joined and queried using Power Query. | | Excel is still 100x more powerful and sophisticated than Sheets | is. | dgudkov wrote: | Your task could be trivially done with EasyMorph | (https://easymorph.com). We've designed it exactly for such use | cases. | | Data needs of non-technical people have long been neglected. It | was believed that any data wrangling should be done by IT | people. So all non-technical people had was Excel. Luckily, the | no-code movement finally started addressing that issue with a | varying degree of success. | ab_testing wrote: | > but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD | webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands | indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a | spreadsheet. What would you use to build a CRUD app faster than | an excel app | rufus_foreman wrote: | Someone who has extensive experience in Excel but only basic | knowledge in software development will quickly realize that | they can develop something in Excel faster than they can build | it in a CRUD app. | analog31 wrote: | I think this raises another point. An apples-to-apples | comparison is only possible if you can do both yourself. If | you're not a coder, then you're comparing _creating_ a | spreadsheet with _managing_ coding. And the latter is even | more difficult to learn than coding itself. | | I'm in the middle ground -- can code until the cows come | home, but can't manage a coding project to save my life. I am | _extremely_ sympathetic when someone has to manage _me_ | coding. I 'm always thinking to myself: How can I avoid | turning this into a nightmare for them? | adepressedthrow wrote: | I certainly get that, but I'm primarily pointing out that as | a non-layman from the software side, it doesn't seem like a | particularly amazing tool. It certainly could be the case | that it's extremely good for non-programmers, I was simply | pointing out that I naively think it's not very well designed | for those usecases. | occamrazor wrote: | I don't know about GSheets, but Excel has dynamic arrays (of | variable lengths) since at least two years ago. Or a couple of | lines of VBA can accomplish the same. | Dyac wrote: | I'm a happy customer of https://exploratory.io/ - it's a very | user-friendly interface on top of R and I think you might find | it helpful. | winphone1974 wrote: | "Several tables and selectively joining them" ... "Enter an id | and filter" | | Sure sounds like your creating a relational database in a | spreadsheet, which is possible but not really the intended | purpose? | adepressedthrow wrote: | Surely that's what lots of non-developer white collar workers | use Excel for? I imagine there's orders of magnitude more | people using Excel for data processing rather than Python or | R. I'm well aware it's not the best tool for the job, but yet | people are using it for purposes such as that. I wanted to | learn more about that experience. | eastbound wrote: | Many people have tried launching an Excel-with-SQL-querying | product, but it's extremely hard to do the UI well. Also | products where people write SQL are impossible to insure. | _dain_ wrote: | >an Excel-with-SQL-querying product | | This is basically what Powerquery is, and it's been built | into Excel for years. And it does other things too. | airstrike wrote: | yeah, but it's really not ergonomic relative to the default | Excel-with-formulas experience | ggcdn wrote: | Excel is transformational. If you're reading this indoors, | there's a good chance that significant portions of the building | around you were engineered using excel. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | I wrote a piece of code that was front-ended by Excel 3, in 1991 | that talked to multiple, heterogeneous databases. There was some | UUCP action, some FTP, DB2 on AS/400, some AT&T Unix, Wang, OS/2, | and so on. It showed inventory and sales charts on a projector | for executives. That thing ran till 2019 because the company | called me and wanted to know how it worked. They were planning to | replace it but could not figure it out. | | Excel never dies. (My first spreadsheet was SuperCalc. It was | amazing, for that time, but no one seems to be talking about | their SuperCalc sheets any more.) | TacticalCoder wrote: | "Excel" became a synonym for spreadsheets. There are millions of | SMEs, today, running on spreadsheets that aren't Excel. My wife | runs her little SME with her paid-for Google Workspace / G Suite: | she and her employees are happily filling 'em little cells from | the browser in their Google world (for better or worse). There | are millions of SMEs like these. | | I should know better and run some spreadsheet locally (or maybe | use Emacs, which of course can do simple spreadsheet stuff) but I | don't bother: I use Google spreadsheets for my VAT, tax, fuel/car | mileage computation etc. | | Many people around me do just that: they never used any advanced | spreadsheet feature and Google spreadsheet is sufficient. | | It's as if anyone using GMail who eventually discovered the | "Google Drive" then realized he had "Excel" there too (it's | Google spreadsheet but they don't care, they still call it | Excel). How many people are using GMail? | | I also know, shocker, one Apple afficionado using Apple numbers | although the Apple users I know typically have GMail / Google | spreadsheet. | | Now here's the funny kicker: besides during that one gig in a 50 | K employees boat, I don't know anyone still using Excel. And, oh | the irony, at that gig I was tasked with porting a spreadsheet to | a dedicated app. | | Of all the Mac laptop users who don't bother having a desktop | anymore... Certainly there are some (like my wife) who need a | spreadsheet right? Are these people actually all buying Excel to | run it on their Mac? Or are Mac users not spreadsheet users!? | | I'm confused. | | To me a more correct article title would be: | | "Spreadsheet never dies" (and "Excel" became a synonym for | "spreadsheet"). | matwood wrote: | > Are these people actually all buying Excel to run it on their | Mac? Or are Mac users not spreadsheet users!? | | I was able to avoid actual Excel for years until I became | responsible for my divisions budget. Accounting people are all | Excel that I can see. | | Until then I used Google Sheets and Numbers just fine on my | mac. And when I was only viewing the budget, Numbers did fine | converting or I could use Excel in read only mode. | youamericanloo wrote: | And, "white collar" created Excel! | PeterStuer wrote: | ... just multiplies. | acheron wrote: | Somewhat tangential, but for unusual uses of Excel I like this | video where Michael Shackleford derives blackjack basic strategy | from scratch using Excel in about half an hour: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCF-Btu5ZCk | [deleted] | Agamus wrote: | In the early 2000s, I built wonderfully complicated 'business | intelligence dashboards' for a company, which pulled together | large sets of data into charty views that could be configured | with drop-down selections. It was user-friendly, and easy to | maintain. They also used it for end-of-year reports which were | more-or-less automatic based a few simple drop-down settings. | Nice on the eyes and everything. | | They're still using it! | majewsky wrote: | > Most software we use at work exists in one of two categories: | | > 1. It's new and we love it for now. | | > 2. It's old but we have to use it and we hate it. | | > [... Microsoft Excel] inhabits its own category: it's old, but | we love it | | There's a fourth quadrant missing in that diagram: "It's new and | we hate it", aka "the Microsoft Teams quadrant". | fleddr wrote: | Excel runs the world. Every large company claiming to be ERP- | native is telling lies. Shit gets done in Excel, and is then | exported back into ERP, if at all. | | Things you would consider quite irresponsible to be done in | Excel, is done in Excel regardless. Indeed, that annual financial | report of a Fortune 500 boils down to financialresults_v2_nowaito | nemorechange_final_FINAL_withcomments_official.xlsx" | | My g/f works for one of the leading ERP providers. I won't tell | you which one but it starts with an S and ends with AP. They're | dogfooding their own ERP but employees prefer Excel. | | It's like gravity, just stop resisting. | ant6n wrote: | Well, theres one issue: everybody hates SAP. | vsareto wrote: | We have non-excel financial reports via a web app, but of | course the actual software requirements were gathered in an | excel file | | It is not vastly easier to use than Excel, but certainly nice | when there's a web app to find instead of a loose file | opnitro wrote: | The video linked in the article has been set to private, anyone | know of a public version? Or a brief summary of the contents? | inglor wrote: | Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone | here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them | here and I will bring them up. | | P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the | feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs. | zerr wrote: | Why there is no "Check spelling as you type" in Excel? | blahedo wrote: | I regularly use gnumeric for my serious spreadsheet work | because Excel can't keep up, and I'm always a little surprised | when I have to send a spreadsheet to someone and I find yet | another thing that Excel doesn't do; I haven't kept a written | list but here's a few off the top of my head (of varying levels | of seriousness): | | - Excel still gets _very_ confused if you have different files | with the same filenames in different directories. At one point | it would even, if you crashed while editing one `grades.xlsx` | file and went to edit a different `grades.xlsx` on restarting, | it would restore the new one from the old swap file, silently | clobbering data. | | - Last I checked, Excel can't do a lot of very basic data | graphing (histograms are the ones that I've run into most | often). | | - Some versions of Excel (the web one, I think) will just | silently not format text that is rotated, making some | spreadsheets completely illegible | | - I got immediately attached to CSE formulas once I discovered | them---they do a lot of things I'd always thought I had to | build a custom program for---but 90% of the time when I build | and debug something in gnumeric with a CSE formula, it works | just as I expected based on experience with abstraction and | data structures in other languages, but then when I bring it | over to Excel to share with other people, one or more of the | Excel functions just don't work properly when lifted over | arrays. Then I have to go create an explicit area of the sheet | (or another sheet) for my intermediate data and copy formulas | to make the computation work, ugh. I really want every single | function that normally takes non-range arguments and produces a | single value to map over a provided range and produce an array | when dropped in a CSE formula. (PS to everyone: if you've never | crossed paths with "Control-Shift-Enter formulas", look them up | and they'll change your life) | | Good to know about the feedback box, though. | rr888 wrote: | Wow great, I used to customize Excel a lot for financial | companies. VBA was good enough until about 20 years ago. VSTO | was never as good because you need admin rights to install it. | ExcelDNA was much better. I gave up 10 years ago so dont know | what is going on now tbh. | | Right now I use Python and Pandas, mostly doing the same stuff | but with more rows and a worse experience. If you could find an | easy way to combine Python and Excel it would be awesome. Like | embedding Python instead of VBA? Would need sandboxing. | knolan wrote: | I miss the interactivity of selecting data in older versions of | Excel (pre 2007). You can see the data ranges highlighted when | you select a series on the plot and you could drag them as | desired. Currently it's very awkward and unintuitive why you | can move ydata but not xdata. | ant6n wrote: | Python support | rad_gruchalski wrote: | Lambdas are awesome but the ui and their management could use | some work. | | It would be great to have a "script" view to manage defined | names instead of hacking them one by one. | | Single line entry isn't efficient and the default assumption | that cursor keys navigate a sheet instead of the formula box, | is annoying. I find myself copying formulas out of excel, | modifying them in a text editor, and pasting them back. | shiftspace-- wrote: | Related project: https://aka.ms/get-afe | nhinck2 wrote: | And shift space being the most annoying of all. | | Being in a formula writing a closing brace only to have the | formula bar explode because I didn't let go of shift in | time. Who wants that? | Enginerrrd wrote: | Ok, besides python support... The thing I'd like more than | anything: | | A better way to edit cell with really long function calls. | | If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the | top and not just in the cell. | | Like, sometimes you just need some if/else statements... but | try to parse and edit even something fairly simple like: | | =IF(AND(LongExpression > 3, | Other_longexpression<5),AnotherLongExpression, | IF(AND(LongExpression>5,Other_longexpression<10), | AnotherLongExpression, 0)) | | Even with the color-coded parentheses, this is really hard! And | God Forbid all those "LongExpression" have a bunch of | parenthesis and PEMDAS that needs to be respected. | | It's... really goddamn tedious. I lost track of the parenthesis | while writing that in this window ...However, if I could just | have a little popout window where I could add arbitrary | new/lines and spaces, that would make a difficult thing into | something downright enjoyable and productive. Something like: | =IF( AND( LongExpression > 3, | Other_longexpression<5 ), | AnotherLongExpression, IF( | AND( LongExpression>5, | Other_longexpression<10 ), | AnotherLongExpression, 0 ) | ) | | Would make things much easier to parse. | not_a_sw_dork wrote: | Oh, and: - The name manager is relatively cumbersome to use. | F.e. at least some copy/clone functionality would be nice. - | Excel table columns cannot be directly used for DVL lists, you | need to create additional named ranges pointing to them. - Once | Excel tables have been created, afaik it is not yet possible to | extend them by additional columns, respective edit their | defined ranges? - RegExp support for DVLs, w/o having to rely | on VBA (desktop only) or OfficeScript (Online only) | djbebs wrote: | Wait really? | | Well if thats the case, making VLookups be able to use any | column as an input or output, rather than being limited to | having the input on the left and the output on the right. | | Ideally I'd be able to have 2 additional parameters, one that | would indicate the column where the input value is to be found, | and another that would indicated the column from which the | output value would come from. | | I know there are some work arounds, but this would really | simplify my life! | djbebs wrote: | Well half that is already done(the output!) | shiftspace-- wrote: | Might be what you're after: https://support.microsoft.com/en- | us/office/xlookup-function-... | jklinger410 wrote: | Please bring back CTRL+SHIFT+V as paste values only | aargh_aargh wrote: | Ctrl-Shift-S? What did it ever do to hurt anyone that it had | to go? | jonemi wrote: | Why doesn't CTRL+Backspace delete a word when editing a cell? | aargh_aargh wrote: | Bring back Access. I understand it needs to be rebuilt, so | probably build it on top of sqlite. There's nothing (popular) | in the niche left by Access. | LiamMcCalloway wrote: | I'm a glass half full kinda of kind, but for excel, the glass | is Feb 1st. Please, types would really help. Maybe as a | property of named ranges ? | lolive wrote: | I really wonder what Excel developpers think of connecting | spreadsheets and master data management services so you can | link data between a spreadsheet and the master data. [wasn't it | the goal of OData?] | not_a_sw_dork wrote: | TrackerFF wrote: | I use Excel every day. I just wish it had native support for | Python or similar when it comes to scripting. VBA is OK - but it | would be nice to get a more programming/script-driven Excel with | support of languages you use for other things too. | | Right now the way we go about this, is kinda hacky. But I have | non-tech collogues that often request some methods or similar | that I've developed, and that usually involves importing / | manipulating / exporting excel files in Python. Would be much | easier if they could just run the code within Excel, and get the | desired results. | xupybd wrote: | Excel is great but it needs better version control and diffs. | It's so hard to maintain compared to plain text source code. | arbol wrote: | Excel lead me to macros, which lead me to VB, to python and | eventually to be a software developer. Thanks Excel! | arey_abhishek wrote: | The spreadsheet UI is the one interface design that will not | disappear in millions of years. Hard to imagine any UI that'll | last longer. This is the very pinnacle | jrm4 wrote: | As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft | hater (ha, check my history..) | | Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming | language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of | giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing | (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.) | iasay wrote: | I would agree. I'm an Apple Numbers user now but I have yet to | find something even remotely as useful as the spreadsheet | abstraction. I use them for everything from solving engineering | problems, forecasting, statistics, decision analysis to | personal finance and project planning. I could solve all of the | problems with a programming language but it'd take 10x as long. | mathattack wrote: | Yes, now if I kind Microsoft could fix copy and paste from the | desktop to online versions... | Aaargh20318 wrote: | > Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash- | programming language ever invented | | I would argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece | of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce | everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the | numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual | human beings it affects. | | It goes from "if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week to | 50 hrs/week, we'll make our deadline" all the way to "look, if | we reduce the number or cancer treatments we authorize by X% | then our profits go up by Y%" | splistud wrote: | jhardy54 wrote: | Is this a criticism of Excel specifically, or is the problem | that it's making basic arithmetic more accessible to | institutions with negative externalities? | Aaargh20318 wrote: | It's a criticism of spreadsheets in general. | jhardy54 wrote: | Does this criticism extend to graphing calculators? | Aaargh20318 wrote: | No. Spreadsheets allow for easy manipulation of large | tables of numbers and immediately see the results. It's | this ability to 'tweak' the numbers quickly that makes it | so dangerous. | kenjackson wrote: | This criticism extends to pretty much math in general. | coliveira wrote: | But this way of thinking has nothing to do with excel in | particular. | mathattack wrote: | Yes, now if only Microsoft could fix copy and paste from the | desktop to online versions... | vic-traill wrote: | Obligatory BillyG Review story from Joel on Software: | | https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... | | It provides a glimpse into the complexity and backwards | compatibility (to Lotus 1-2-3 no less!) that I find | interesting. | heavyset_go wrote: | Agree with this entirely. Excel is the most successful and most | productive "low code" platform out there. | elefanten wrote: | I feel like I'm stuck in a timeloop. I swear I've read almost | this exact comment as the top comment of a different (monthly) | "Hacker News debates Excel" thread | agumonkey wrote: | There are a few things reactive formulaic spreadsheets need to | do before reaching peak. Normalization like concepts. | Abstractions. | | It will come. | jrm4 wrote: | I'm unfortunately pessimistic. Not because they couldn't, but | because in today's IT environment, "empowering the user" is | perhaps the lowest priority. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | It already arrived in the form of Lotus Improv. | agumonkey wrote: | improv never caught up sadly.. but hey, it's reboot decade | so time to dust it off in react | PeterStuer wrote: | I've seen Excel trive in no places more so than those commited | to the "one true ERP" religeon. | | And it is not subversion. It is people trying to do their job | despite draconian topdown unworcable policies and systems | shoved down their thoat, keeping the operations side afloat in | the face of debilitating managerial ignorance. | hef19898 wrote: | From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people | refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is | offering. Often with disasterous results, results that nobody | really sees because it is just the status quo. Nothing wrong | to use Excel for reporting and number crunching, ERP systems | are not designed to do that. | | I hate it when people take short cuts and corners because | they refuse to accept that an ERP is there for a reason. I | also hate it when the people setting uo an ERP ignore | business needs. UX so is, rightly so, taking a back seat in | all of these discusions. | dragonwriter wrote: | > From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people | refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is | offering. | | From experience, most Excel solutions are because people | get rebuffed (or have learned by experience that they will | expend lots of effort and the be rebuffed or given | something not fit for purpose) by the bureaucratic | processes necessary to get anything provided to them by | their enterprise systems (ERP or otherwise) by the high | priesthood that centrally administers those systems. | hef19898 wrote: | As part of that priesthood, Excel is neither SOX nor | otherwise compliant. If users get rebuffed, that is the | overall system working as intended. | dragonwriter wrote: | As someone who has worked on both sides, if you don't | want people making crappy excel-based, local-to-their- | shop solutions, but they are because of the | unresponsiveness and inutility of your central IT | bureaucracy, the system is not, in fact, working as | intended. | threatripper wrote: | It does the job and it enables "regular folks" to solve | business problems. This creates value. Most business problems | don't require sophisticated IT systems. | | Sometimes I catch myself thinking about a sophisticated | solution involving commercial software packages, databases, | webservers, cloud services etc. and then I remember "If I bend | the problem just a little bit it fits into an Excel table with | a bit of VBA glue and the problem is solved in a much less | complicated way. Our scale is small so it will stay solved for | years to come. My coworkers can handle and maintain the file so | it doesn't fall back to me when problems arise. So yeah, stupid | as it may sound, Excel is the best solution for this problem." | iasay wrote: | Avoiding any custom software development and purchasing is | the number one priority for small to medium businesses that | want to survive if you ask me. I've seen a couple of them | killed by software. At this point I'd rather work for a | company that is held together with Excel than "domain | specific enterprise software" having worked in that sector | for years. | | Actually the most fun I ever had was being the "IT guy" as a | secondary function in a small engineering business in 2001. | That was amazing. I didn't have to do a lot and could | concentrate on my primary role with enough distractions to | make it and my secondary one interesting. We just ran a | Windows 2000 domain with 9 workstations on a switch with a | 512K ADSL router and it basically just worked flawlessly. | Excel 2000 featured heavily. | | I occasionally get the urge to build out a Windows 2000 and | Office 2000 box just because it was the last windows release | that I enjoyed. | cosmodisk wrote: | I've seen enough cases where the opposite is the case. | Businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are often very | inefficient, drowning in more problems than solutions and | the day to day workflows for employees are awful. I'm not | trying to say a small shop should go all in with Oracle or | SAP, however a healthy investment in specialised software | often pays off extremely well. | TAForObvReasons wrote: | Specialized software is a market for lemons. Most | businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are ill- | equipped to judge the vendors in question, and more often | than not the net result is worse than the Excel mess. | cosmodisk wrote: | If you are an average business with no internal expertise | to evaluate vendors: well of course everyone's going to | spin you whilst the money keeps flying out of your | pockets. Smarter companies would at least hire people | that could advise on such things. | lazide wrote: | If you had the organizational expertise to hire such a | person, and the leadership to prioritize it enough to | happen - you already would probably not need them that | much. | cosmodisk wrote: | People like that get hired through recommendations. I | interacted with some companies where nobody would know | shit about anything tech related but the senior managers | were fairly well connected in the business world, so | getting someone impartial who could advise on how to | proceed wasn't too bad. | hef19898 wrote: | It cuts both ways, doesn't it? Excel is no replacement | for a dedicated ERP system, as soon as you need one of | those get one. Excel can replace a lot of analytics and | KPI software packages, and fill in gaps in any ERP | system. It is cheaper to, cautiously, fill those gaps | with an Excel solution (if well documented) than | developing a customized ERP solution. | | I currebtly see people using Palantir as the default for | _anything and everything_ , only to export stuff from | Palantir to Excel anyways. | iasay wrote: | You waste it on Excel or you waste it on subscriptions, | opex and consultants. | | Or you hire someone who can shape the business processes | towards efficiency with the tools you already have... | mathgladiator wrote: | I share that thought which is one of the reasons I'm so | excited about the platform I'm building. While I'm trying | really hard to focus on being a "vertically integrated board | game company", there is the siren song to go beyond board | games and make a platform for business. | | I wrote a programming language which is like a better | structured Excel with a reactive database. It's super fun to | play with at the moment, but it's immature: | https://www.adama-platform.com/ | marcodiego wrote: | > ever invented | | That would be visicalc then. | dccoolgai wrote: | As a developer, when I worked in VBA it was just way more | rewarding and appreciated. I was way happier with the work I | was doing and having a much bigger (and more visible) impact... | Sadly I got paid roughly 1/4 of what I get paid now to muck | around in package.json files all day. I know it's not | fashionable to say,but yeah I feel like Excel is underrated and | scoffed at by the "serious tech" community when it should be | lauded as an example to strive towards. | EddySchauHai wrote: | It's actually pretty technically awesome too. When I was | studying for an MSc in CS I focused on program synthesis and | one of the key papers of applied program synthesis is | Flashfill in Excel (https://www.microsoft.com/en- | us/research/wp-content/uploads/...). It might seem boring but | there's a lot of really cool stuff in the backend of it! | RodgerTheGreat wrote: | Hypercard. | | The difference, of course, is that Excel wasn't abandoned by | its owners like Hypercard was. | eddieroger wrote: | Dammit I miss HyperCard. HyperCard got me in to programming | by making it accessible to someone who didn't even realize | they were doing it - my Hebrew teacher in third grade. There | haven't been many tools that can make anything from a simple | card file to Myst. I wish there was something like that | today, or that I was a good enough engineer to contribute to | a modern replacement. | simonh wrote: | There are quite a few options, including emulators, clones | and HC inspired projects. | | https://hypercard.org/ | karencarits wrote: | It's not a replacement per se, but tiddlywiki is the closest | I have seen of a very flexible yet easy-to-use framework for | people who have limited programming skills | https://tiddlywiki.com/ There is a long list of tools built | in tiddlywiki: https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM | sedatk wrote: | My brother teaches Decision Support Systems using Excel+VBA at | the university because he found that students became productive | fastest with it. Spreadsheet model introduced by VisiCalc is | probably one of the greatest paradigms introduced in computing | making certain programming scenarios extremely accessible. I wish | we had more innovations on par with spreadsheets down the road | but I don't think we did. | davchana wrote: | True. In my last job I was unofficial HR, timekeeper, purchaser, | schedule maker, everything. | | My precessor used to do everything on paper. He had files of | leave forms, monthly attendance timesheets, rotation scheudles | etc. | | I started using a excel sheet. One sheet named db, listing the | employee number, names, start date, position, entitled leave | days, manager name, work pattern (day only, any shift). | | Then over time I added other sheets like leave details, which | pulls employee data from db, and adds more data like their | aprooved vacation slots etc. | | A sheet listing every day of the year in columns, and rows as | employee names & numbers, and I will manually tyoe N for Night, D | for Day, F for Friday OFF, H for Holiday, V for Vacation. | | Then another sheets pulls data & shows me for my chosen month a | printed & formatted schedule. It also lists the percentage of | workforce, and their divisions. | | Another sheet pulls vacation data for one employee for my chosen | year. | | It was fun creating all those formulas. | zelphirkalt wrote: | Is it Excel that never dies, or is it the concept of spreadsheets | in general? | bee_rider wrote: | Hmm. Well there's been a spreadsheet program called Excel | around for quite a while. But I guess like the rest of | Microsoft's programs, it has been updated over time. Maybe this | is a Ship of Theseus sort of thing. | GnarfGnarf wrote: | Excel is great, but sometimes it can be abused. I have seen some | horrendously complicated VBA sheets that are so much simpler to | program in any procedural language. | | If you want to create or read Excel spreadsheets | programmatically, I recommend LibXL, a simple and powerful C++ | library. https://www.libxl.com/ | | (I am a customer, am not associated with them). | occamrazor wrote: | Can you expand on that? My view of VBAis that it is a dated, | but pretty much standard procedural language. | GnarfGnarf wrote: | I have seen ungodly contortions to bend Excel to the will of | the creator of the spreadsheet, when a few lines of C++ or | Python or whatever code would do the trick easily. | Intermediate results are stored in columns with no | possibility of comments or explanations. You can't get an | overview of the logic, as you would by looking at a page of | code: it's just cryptic Excel formulae in isolated cells. The | constraint of the single-line make formulas opaque and | inscrutable. In the end, the whole thing is a mess, | impossible to maintain or update. | | It's not the VBA that is the problem. It's the disparate | scattering of business logic. | | Don't get me wrong: Excel is brilliant for some things. But | it has been extended beyond reason by wannabe programmers in | the accounting department who discover they chose the wrong | career. | andriodsheep wrote: | "Microsoft launched Excel in 1985 exclusively on the Macintosh. | It was that counterintuitive decision to launch on its | competitor's computer while Lotus 1-2-3 was stuck on its own MS- | DOS" - crazy that microsoft recognised its own deficiency | (difficult UI) and took a big bet with their competitor. | Microsoft and Apple's relationship has been complicated from the | start | daveslash wrote: | My dad, a retired accountant, still refuses to switch from | Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel. | civilized wrote: | Wow. Legendary dude. | taviso wrote: | Tell him about my Linux port, I'm updating it regularly and | fixing bugs :) | | https://github.com/taviso/123elf/wiki/Getting-Started | acheron wrote: | My dad did that too for awhile but eventually gave in. | molsongolden wrote: | Had to rebuild all of my dad's Lotus 1-2-3 sheets in Excel to | finally force the switch! | pelagicAustral wrote: | Bit of Excel humor seems appropriate: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY (Krazam) | taraskuzyk wrote: | Krazam is how my 3-minute bathroom break turns into an obscure | comedy deep-dive | password4321 wrote: | 302 comments last year: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386419 | | If all you have is this hammer, check out | https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol to automate | workflows in the browser with Excel VBA. | alexklarjr wrote: | Excel is driving whole computing evolution - if you could count | sum of all CEO quarterly bonuses and draw a neat rising graph | quick enough, corporations will never upgrade their laptops and | workstations. | tibbydudeza wrote: | I am currently writing Python with Pandas - reading in genormous | XLS spreadsheets to wrangle them into yet another XLS spreadsheet | which is then fed to a legacy system to read in. | | Excel truely is the universal data programming tool. | excelrus wrote: | In my experience, no matter how fancy or automated the data | pipeline is, all decision makers want the data in front of them | in Excel eventually. Excel is king. | madrox wrote: | There are so many technologies Microsoft has tried to go all in | on over the years...Internet Explorer, Edge, and .Net to name a | few. | | Why they've never gone all in on the idea of Excel as a | fundamental part of the operating system on top of which more | sophisticated apps operate baffles me. | vikingerik wrote: | 1. Excel never had a viable competitor that Microsoft needed to | use their OS monopoly to exclude. | | 2. Excel sells for a good amount of money and they wouldn't | want to cut that off. | GuB-42 wrote: | It is a smart decision and a point where many companies fail. | | Excel works perfectly as it is, it is a product that sells | well, there is no reason to change it. They modernize it from | time to time, but they follow what may be the most important | thing in production: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. | | Internet Explorer? It was already broken to begin with. Edge? | No one wants it. .Net? Made to compete against Java, now facing | competition from browser engines. These products have room for | improvement, they need to be worked on. Excel just needs to | keep being Excel. | 98codes wrote: | The language in Microsoft Power Apps is basically the formula | language from Excel, with cell references (A1) replaced with | properties (TextBox.Text) -- only thing I'm aware of that comes | close though. | henning wrote: | I worked at several companies where the main competition is Excel | and competing against it sucks because you have to change how | people work to get them to use their product and people don't | like that. They come up with "deal breakers" about why the | software won't work for them and then imply that if you fix those | things, they will adopt it. This is always false. I'm hoping my | next job has another company as its main competitor instead. | Closi wrote: | You have to have a compelling reason for changing away from an | excel spreadsheet from a users perspective. | | If you give users their exact spreadsheet but in a web | interface, you have probably given them zero benefit and | removed all flexibility (i.e. what would have been a new column | in three seconds is now a feature request to IT). | henning wrote: | Yes, I've sat through all the meetings and customer calls | where we talk about uncovering pain, addressing pain to | deliver value. The customers are thrilled. Everyone is high- | fiving. | | Then they go live and no one uses the service. Then it turns | out there are "deal breakers" that mean they can't use the | app. It's the same story over and over. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-04 23:00 UTC)