[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.
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