'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/28/microsoft-excel-spreadsheet-program-40-years

by iechoz6H • 2 years ago

142 362 2 years ago

vlovich1235• 2 years ago

Quotes from people 30 and above which sounds about right. Is anyone these days growing up using Excel over Google Sheets? You used to have to pirate Excel and Google just gives it away for free with a free email account.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

But then you have all the usability issues of a complex app shoehorned into a browser. I'll always use a native application when it's available.

baq8• 2 years ago

Sheets is unfortunately mostly better than Numbers.

thimabi2• 2 years ago

Not disagreeing, but I find it very ironic that there’s little difference in performance between Excel as a native app and as a web app. I don’t know if that mostly reflects the technical prowess of the web dev team or the inefficiencies of the native app.

dartharva3• 2 years ago

Excel leaves GSheets and all its alternatives in the dust in terms of performance and stability.

I used to maintain MIS trackers in Google Sheets once, and when my company made the inevitable shift to MS Suite I saw an immediate improvement. FWIW I'm 25.

gregates• 2 years ago

Well, not all its alternatives. There's one spreadsheet out there that has better performance than Excel: https://rowzero.io/home

vlovich1235• 2 years ago

I think you’re talking about it in a professional environment. That won’t matter if the people are growing up on GSheets today & demand that tool from their employer. Very old tale in SW.

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

Certainly compared to early Google Sheets this is true, and it may be that first impression that a lot of older people still remember.

Google Sheets today is totally adequate for most people's spreadsheet needs. I'd believe there are cases where Excel is still better, but they are at the extreme end of "power user" use cases.

baq8• 2 years ago

Free isn’t good enough. Sheets has stupid limitations like a hard cap of 10M or so cells per document.

happytoexplain• 2 years ago

I love GSheets for convenience. But as soon as you're doing anything large and complex, GSheets might as well not even exist. It's simply not viable.

vlovich1235• 2 years ago

GSheets is the good enough factor and the collaborative features were baked in from the start. I feel like MS struggles a bit in that respect. Look at the instructions for collaborating in Excel: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-ex...

fassssst• 2 years ago

Excel is free online too.

mindslight• 2 years ago

Immediately focusing on the distinction between Microsoft Excel Proper and competing implementations with essentially similar functionality is so weird to me. I feel a fondness for this article despite not having used Microsoft Excel itself for like two decades. The point is the larger genre, and the empowerment of programming and data management capabilities it creates for regular users.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

I have private information in my files, and I don't want to share it with google. Google will scan it, use it for ad profiling, sell to whomever and store all commits for eternity. Quote probably government has access too.

And, of course, they will use it for AI training, which could be reverse-engineered in the future to extract training data.

ddingus6• 2 years ago

Exactly.

I always have at least one machine setup with all local tools and storage.

Any new ideation and certainly anything private gets done on that computer first.

heraldgeezer4• 2 years ago

I worked for an MSP in Europe, so IT provider.

No company used Google Workspace. All where Office 365.

You use what the company wants you to use :)

If you zoomerettes try to use your own google account you will get flagged for data extraction. :)

Also the web version of office is free, did you know? https://www.office.com/

smallerdemon• 2 years ago

My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.

baq8• 2 years ago

Numbers could be nice if it was fast. Unfortunately it’s dog slow. It’s good enough with the simplest formulas, but once you try to actually use it for anything, it becomes unbearable.

alwillis4• 2 years ago

Certainly Numbers 14.2 on a recent Mac isn't slow.

Not saying you're doing this but it's not uncommon for someone to say something is slow when it's a version from 10 years ago.

YVoyiatzis• 2 years ago

I've exclusively used Numbers for as long as the app has been around. It meets all of my needs, including almost seamless Excel compatibility for imports and exports should the need arise.

The IT industry overall remains similarly entrenched. Enterprise software vendors insist on Windows dependency, staying tethered to outdated standards; upholding an inefficient status quo that serves only MSFT, developers, and technicians—not users nor progress.

LightBug1• 2 years ago

And us industry standard excel users hate when we send you Excel sheets (for a good reason) and then you use and edit them in .numbers, and then send them back as .numbers without a care in the world ... often we lose all the background goodness we built in (often designed to make your life easier!) ... you in the general sense ... calms shaking rage

standardUser• 2 years ago

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.

Google Sheets is great, but I'm probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a more robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.

hotsauceror• 2 years ago

I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one.

Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation?

I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.

CogitoCogito• 2 years ago

To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

Not parent, but in my spreadsheets fonts map to certainty ranges.

Serifs in increasing somberness for the most concrete numbers, sans for everyday estimates, and papyrus whenever I just toss random numbers in.

DrBazza• 2 years ago

And there I was getting bothered about the limits of the xlcall c api.

wizzwizz4• 2 years ago

Running 32-bit Excel mitigates quite a few of the limits. Sadly, I haven't managed to get WoW64 DLLs to load in 64-bit Excel: that would eliminate the majority of the issues, but it's tricky to set that up in the first place without the ability to store 64-bit return values (e.g. handles).

quickthrowman• 2 years ago

It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.

I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts.

You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel.

What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?

fsckboy3• 2 years ago

don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics

so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces"

every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same.

so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each pointsize are all separate fonts, and that's what he might have too many of.

leptons4• 2 years ago

I can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

skeeter20204• 2 years ago

Maybe a title, and perhaps some callout cells? but more than 8? I'm stretching to find a use case requiring 3 or 4.

jen729w• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

Thanks, you completed my bingo card.

kichimi• 2 years ago

I feel like this is a pretty important thing for the technically minded to get their heads around.

Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?

fragmede3• 2 years ago

You're pretty sure it's the wrong tool, but you can't imagine a use case for a fairly basic feature of said tool?

Why do I now doubt your assertion?

PebblesRox• 2 years ago

I had a friend who used Excel to render blueprints for the dream house she was designing. As an architecture student, I was both impressed and horrified!

fuzzfactor5• 2 years ago

Try it with more memory and/or larger swapfile space on your drive.

It might be OK until 8 specialty fonts need to be reproduced beyond a certain number of cells. If more memory was all it takes to fix, that would be good to know.

NeoTar• 2 years ago

Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme).

I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, but missing another, allowing better testing, and type safety for data.

baq8• 2 years ago

Best part: Excel supports your example and many other similar quality of programmers life use cases and has been for years if not decades (e.g. named ranges and tables). For some reason people don’t use them.

RodgerTheGreat• 2 years ago

A downright comical number of analytics products are crude reimplementations of lesser-known Excel features. A rudimentary understanding of pivot tables or "goal seek" can be enough to blow minds even among an audience that has used Excel on a daily basis for decades. Spreadsheets, like word processors and presentation tools, are so omnipresent that organizations tend to assume their operation is absorbed through osmosis, and therefore fail to invest in training.

thimabi2• 2 years ago

I guess when you add type safety and tests to an app like Excel, it becomes so much closer to programming languages that it makes more sense to ditch the app and just write code directly.

Even today, complex logic in Excel is mostly done through VBA, JavaScript, Python and the like.

bcoates• 2 years ago

There's PowerQuery, built into Excel. It can do some great stuff (love me some fuzzy join) but the ergonomics are apocalyptic.

This is actually the root problem of trying to improve or extend Excel--it has a truly ancient, horribly broken sharing/ipc/embedding model that is integrated into everything and can't be easily fixed or worked around.

Cordiali2• 2 years ago

Power Query/M is the only functional language I've used, a couple years ago. I actually quite liked it, I even built up a collection of my own functions.

It's just a pity the editor is literally worse than Notepad. And the implementation wants to reload a file twenty times. And the security stuff doesn't really work, so you're constantly turning that off. And and and.

datatrashfire• 2 years ago

I think the main feature of excel that makes it the killer app it is, is that it is extremely approachable to non technical people. Making it more like programming erodes the core feature that motivates its use.

ripped_britches• 2 years ago

I got into professional programming via VBA in Excel

NBJack4• 2 years ago

No joke, I built a Excel compiler once. All functions written became legit code you could compile down to a binary. But wow, I learned a lot about how complex that could get... my intermediate language was technically readable, but when every cell is a function, it got so big it would break the target binary compiler unless I split it up. Good times though....

rr808• 2 years ago

Its really disappointing that VBA stopped improving since 20 years ago. Imagine if you could embed C# or even better F# in workbooks, and also have a way to better way to package libraries. We wouldn't see Python notebooks.

Apocryphon• 2 years ago

Obligatory Krazam:

https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY

https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI

throwaway106382• 2 years ago

I’ve only ever used Libre(open) Office Calc since I’ve never paid for or bothered to pirate office before. What can Excel do that Calc can’t?

I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.

baq8• 2 years ago

I’ve used Excel and Calc and the short answer is ‘everything’. Excel is faster, more reliable and has a much bigger community.

Calc is ok if you want to work with small spreadsheets and don’t care about the occasional bug.

nocman• 2 years ago

not the parent, but 'everything' is a mostly unhelpful answer.

A few important concrete examples would be much more interesting. In fairness, you did somewhat, but I would be interested in some more details.

AnonC• 2 years ago

I use Calc on my personal machine.

What can Excel do that Calc can’t?

For one, a working copy paste. Seriously, I’ve lived with a copy paste bug in LibreOffice Calc (Windows) for years (it wasn’t yet fixed as of a few months ago). It will either paste an older copy or not paste anything even though I just hit Ctrl+C (sometimes multiple times) within Calc. This is one of the most irritating things about Calc.

Fonts and formatting is another thing that Calc miserably fails at in relation to copy paste. Multiple cells will look very different even though the font, size, etc., will appear the same in the dropdowns below the menus (when these cells are in focus). LibreOffice Calc, in many ways, portrays the worst of what one would expect from an open source project (I say this as a supporter/donor of Document Foundation).

The other part about what Excel can do that Calc can’t is that Microsoft (at least with the MS365 subscription version) has been adding more functions to improve older functions and features. I don’t remember everything, but SEQUENCE and XLOOKUP are two functions that come to mind on this aspect. LibreOffice Calc lags behind Excel on functions by several years.

LibreOffice Calc, though it’s a lot newer/younger than Excel, also has ~weird~ different keyboard shortcuts compared to Excel (e.g. adding a new line within a cell is Ctrl+Enter whereas it’s Alt+Enter in Excel; there are many more like this).

Nevertheless, I use Calc because I can’t bother to pay Microsoft and since Excel might be the only application that could be of value to me in its Office offerings (MS Word is total crap, PowerPoint isn’t as keyboard friendly as I’d like it to be, and Outlook is another total piece of crap).

timbit42• 2 years ago

I use LibreOffice on Linux and don't have any copy/paste or fonts and formatting issues like you are describing. I wouldn't be surprised if such bugs get fixed more quickly on Linux because Linux users don't have an easy way to use Excel, while the vast majority of Windows users do use Excel so there are fewer LibreOffice for Windows users complaining.

Excel does have more functions but 90% of people don't need those. If you do, you do.

copperx3• 2 years ago

Excel also has that program synthesis algorithm to fill cells following a pattern. I haven't seen it anywhere else.

biorach• 2 years ago

It will either paste an older copy or not paste anything even though I just hit Ctrl+C (sometimes multiple times) within Calc.

Weird. I've used Calc extensively on Windows and Linux and have never come across this

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

FWIW, a permanent 1-machine Excel-only license key is pretty affordable on G2A et al.

cendyne• 2 years ago

There was a day when Excel was used as a password manager. It might have been password protected. It might not have.

onionisafruit• 2 years ago

Soon after I started my first IT job, my boss had me fill out a spreadsheet with everybody’s local desktop password so we could do updates when they aren’t around. It was a very awkward week asking people for their passwords. That was almost 30 years ago, and I still remember a few people’s passwords.

grvbck• 2 years ago

Then we had fiber (FTTH) installed in my building, the installation company delivering the routers wrote everybody's router username, password and SSID with a whiteboard marker on the outside of the door, "to make the installation easier for the technicians".

heraldgeezer4• 2 years ago

Still happens lol

Some companies dont want to learn a new tool

Or pay for a new tool like itglue/bitwarden/keeper

terminalbraid• 2 years ago

I think of Excel as a neat example of a rare local minimum in the great programming space. I think R gets to something close like this too.

You can technically accomplish about any programming task you want in it, albeit with poor ergonomics for anything sufficiently complicated, and a small but real push in that area of work will lead you to use a more accepted form of "programming".

However, due to whatever environment, desired or perceived skillsets (or limitations), other pressures, people stay and remain with that local tooling minimum for things that should have outgrown it. If you ever meet an office's "excel person" you instantly understand this phenomena.

MostlyStable3• 2 years ago

R is mostly benefiting from network effects. Everyone in the life sciences uses it (I think economists mostly use Statista and engineers/physicists seem to use a lot of MatLab?), which means that all the things that they need get R libraries (and blog posts explaining how to do them, and publications validating their use, etc.). And the way that academic scientists work mean that most of the downsides of R don't actually matter.

I will completely agree with almost any list of deficiencies that you come up with for R. But I will disagree that almost anything on that list actually matters for an academic lab using it to conduct analyses.

As for it's use outside of academia, I couldn't comment.

williamcotton• 2 years ago

I much prefer ggplot over other options!

HPsquared• 2 years ago

I'm an Excel person who is branching into PowerShell. Similar "no tools required" approach.

jpc0• 2 years ago

I mean... I have some spreadsheets that are pretty complicated and almost certainly could be a fully fledged program but, well it's already there and I don't need to figure out whatever framework / library I need to present the data as a PDF, excel already does that...

I 100% get the appeal of excel for many tasks and realistically when used as a tool it is extremely powerful and removes a lot of things (like how to display the data) out of what I need to care about.

MostlyStable3• 2 years ago

I don't need 95% of excel's features, and it does a lot of things that I don't want or need. But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do (which almost entirely revolve around just viewing simple .csv data files.

Primarily I want searching, sorting, and filtering, and the ability to quickly get sums/means of selected cells would be nice (although not really that necessary). I've been using Modern CSV for a while now (after discovering it on HackerNews last year sometime), and it's mostly very good (good enough that I don't regret the purchase price), but it has some stability issues and the documentation is severely lacking. But the main thing is that it's not quite good enough for me to not have to at least occasionally break out excel.

fifilura2• 2 years ago

Google Sheets worked fine for me. The UI is intuitive and stripped down. And it has much better networking/collaboration support compared to Microsoft that has it bolted on.

MostlyStable3• 2 years ago

I may be being silly about this, and I probably should at least try how well google sheets works for me as a regular part of my workflow, but I'd really prefer an actual local piece of software than a web app.

breckognize• 2 years ago

You should check out Row Zero (https://rowzero.io). We launched on HN earlier this year. Our CSV handling is the best on the market.

You can import multi GB csvs, we auto infer your format, and land your data in a full-featured spreadsheet that supports filter, sort, ctrl-F, sharing, graphs, the full Excel formula language, native Python, and export to Postgres, Snowflake, and Databricks.

layer82• 2 years ago

Our CSV handling is the best on the market.

It’s ironic that you cite the one thing that being bad at hasn’t held Excel back. ;)

skeeter20204• 2 years ago

or skip the spreadsheet and go relational with DuckDB. Pretty cool to run directly against a set of CSVs and get performant, results in a language most of us already know and use regularly.

max514• 2 years ago

But I have yet to find something that gets rid of most of the features that I don't want while keeping the things I do

The interface is customizable. You can remove any icons or group of icons on the ribbon that you don't like and you can reorganize them in any way you want. Just right click on the ribbon and click "customize the ribbon".

coffeeshopgoth• 2 years ago

Right on time for the Excel World Championships... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NP5FBB2G0

vl• 2 years ago

This is unendurable, this article didn’t actually say what are the names of the babies! To describe entire process and then leave out the result is just bad journalism.

mannyv• 2 years ago

Excel is probably the most useful application ever made. Pretty much every professional services implementation and technical account management engagement is done via excel.

For me, I've used it for budgets, to-do lists, etl, reporting, financials. Its data handling utility is pretty much unmatched. It's super easy at this point to see anything with it.

It's well worth any price for sure. It's really the only reason I have a 365 subscription at this point. And like everyone else, I doubt I've used more than 2% of it.

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

This is one of the things LLM's have helped me move off excel. I have an office pc that has microsoft windows + office and home pc that only has linux mint and libreoffice. Previously for anything related to excel I would by habit remote into my office pc to get it done.

I started asking how to do stuff on libreoffice on chat gpt and google gemini. And looking at how detailed explanations we have on how to use spreadsheets explained in easy to understand terms for comparably non tech users a lot of stuff became easy to do. As llm had detailed usually correct answers and suggestions. I would have learned my way to doing it anyway but LLM's brought the learning curve down from a few hours to a few min so was willing to just use libre office.

copperx3• 2 years ago

That's cool. I'm wondering if using an LLMs could make using Pandas or R as easy as Excel.

NBJack4• 2 years ago

I doubt that. Pandas is stupidly powerful... for raw data, experiments, and ML model training/inference. But in my experience it rapidly becomes an esoteric box at times when you need to get data back out of it.

ddingus6• 2 years ago

That is a great skill to have.

When I set Win 11 or earlier version PCs for others, I always load up Void Tools "Everything" and then swing by FossHUB for the full set of tools.

Libre Office, Inkscape, and many more all go on the machine.

And then I explain what they just got and what it is worth. Almost everyone ends up being able to use the OSS tools.

Doing this saves a ton of money!

heraldgeezer4• 2 years ago

Honestly for office just massgrave it

The rest, yes I love OSS tools on Windows.

But have fun when their important word docs get garbled

(it's an example, do not come after me with some "uuuh acually word docs open fine now")

NBJack4• 2 years ago

Good old LibreOffice. I too fall back on that when Sheets fails me. It takes effort to justify Excel (or even Office) licenses in my workplace, but LibreOffice is available and approved for use. I won't say the 90s era interface impresses me, but it has become a shockingly solid product.

486sx33• 2 years ago

Because I’m so used to excel, I really have a hard time using sheets, it’s different enough to be annoying and easy enough to export to xls to open in excel and do things the way I want to.

One thing I’ve had success with lately is chat-gpt 4o to manipulate large sheets. Sometimes it is really dumb and ruins my data, so always keep the last iteration handy… Sometimes it does some really great things, especially comparing multiple excel files.

wslh• 2 years ago

Based on this, I'd love to brainstorm here on HN about what a next-generation Excel could look like, one that keeps Excel’s core strengths without expanding into database like features found in tools like Airtable. Here are a few ideas:

1. Clear Separation between UI/UX and Backend: By separating the user interface from backend processes—perhaps as a module or library—Excel could maintain its clean, familiar interface while supporting more complex calculations and data handling in the background. This concept is somewhat akin to “Microsoft Excel Services.”

2. Multi-Language Formula Support: Similar to how VSCode supports multiple programming languages, Excel could allow users to choose between languages for cell formulas. Many users are comfortable with the current formula syntax, but it feels outdated, and even Google Sheets has (obviously?) largely replicated this old model. Allowing for different languages, while keeping the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, could enable more advanced and flexible workflows.

3. Enhanced Data Types and Representations: Cells or groups of cells could support stronger data types, richer formatting, and custom representations, like embedded charts.

4. Integrated Data Connectivity: Excel could come with built-in tools to connect to external data sources and export data in structured formats, perhaps managed with an external orchestrator. I know you can do this with Excel and some other tools but I would like to just mark a cell and indicating that it can be consumed in a specific endpoint.

5. No artificial limits to the number of columns and rows.

kjellsbells4• 2 years ago

6? Explicit versioning of spreadsheets, eg a Commit to GitHub button. 365 saves continuously but doesnt have the mental step of making you record what changed. Along the same lines, diff for spreadsheets that supported diff-by-value and diff-by-formula.

7? Beef up the recommended pivot tables. Not to jump on the AI bandwagon, but any table that has Sales$ and dates is ripe for suggesting sales by qtr, week etc. Let the AI inspect the table and make suggestions.

8. Beef up the programmability. The Record Macro feature emits VBA but the code is very literal (eg it sees you move to row 12345, and records that, not understanding that what you mean is 'move to the last row') and the IDE is primitive. Fold in copilot experience to the IDE, modernize the UI, and allow macros to be integrated with github instead of buried in some personal.xlb file that is all too easy to lose.

ChicagoDave6• 2 years ago

I have my personal weekly budget spreadsheet open on my laptop at all times. I balance my checking account almost daily to know where all the money is going. I did pay for Monarch to see if it would be better and although it’s nice, Excel is still just better.

One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.

You will pry Excel from my cold dead hands.

zwarag• 2 years ago

While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this.

How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle: 1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances 2. Year-over-year analysis 3. Category management 4. Historical tracking

Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?

kenjackson• 2 years ago

Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets are good for? I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you’re doing.

orev• 2 years ago

I suspect that your database background is causing you to think too formally about how people structure Excel data. For the vast majority, they’re not normalizing data, running queries on sheets, etc. I can easily see this as one tab per account, then pulling in specific cells on other tabs for summaries and other analysis.

goodlinks2• 2 years ago

There are many ways to skin a cat, but my advice how to try it an excel way (assuming a db backgound) would be..

try dumber things, sounds stupid but you dont need rules and structure, just data :)

denormalise a more often to break down the problem, the data and problem are your goal not structure (as much as db).

Yes period per tab type of thing is quite common, as at some point you want to close the period and never change it.

Lean into the non-standardisation to handle the real world. E.g for most of your budget its one line per item per month but this one are flexes with headcount so that has its own page, and tax is balnced in month x so ill just over type all the formulae there when the real numbers come in.

Also if the model is complex try naming fields and showing the formula in a cell next to it to remind you how its calculated (if not ready using it check out "format as table" to do this for tabular data)

And yes pivot the crap out of everything.

There is also "add to model" which gives you powerbi type modelling in excel which can also be handy and fast.

Not extensive list, and for lots of things db is better when you know how to use it.. but those are some of the "i get it" scenarios for me

danielmarkbruce6• 2 years ago

Once you go down the relational path, it's really hard to get out of it (and I don't even think you should, I think you are right).

pixelatedindex2• 2 years ago

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t? I don’t always carry my laptop with me, so local files are kind of annoying.

arcbyte• 2 years ago

Google Sheets doesnt have Solver in the consumer version for one.

In reference to your second statement though, I also dont always carry my laptop but it doesn't matter because my spreadhseets are in onedrive too, so I can close my laptop and open my phone and have the same spreadsheet with zero thought.

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

You can use Excel in the exact same way with Microsoft 365.

radpanda• 2 years ago

I’m not the commenter that you’re replying to but I always get a different “feel” when using a native application like Excel than a web app. I can type as fast as I can think, switching cells, typing values, invoking keyboard shortcuts, etc, and every keystroke is interpreted as I intended. It’s incredible what’s been achieved in modern web apps like Google Sheets, but I still feel like I need to slow down at times to watch what the app is up to - making sure the cell was selected in the UI before entering text or watching to be sure the browser didn’t intercept a shortcut, etc.

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 years ago

Robust macro capability (VBA>AppScript), more advanced data analysis/validation and charting, easy integration with SQL/PBI, a mature add-in market.

And less tangible: it just feels much faster. I don't have any data for this last claim, it's purely based on personal experience. Although, when I use web Excel, this edge goes away.

And I don't use local files at all with Excel. Everything is either in OneDrive or SharePoint, accessible through web or app on whatever platform.

foobiekr5• 2 years ago

These days, I prefer google sheets for most things spreadsheet, but Excel is far and away more capable, and after a certain level of complexity, just unbelievably fast in comparison. Complex sheets in Google Sheets get bogged down very quickly, and the data-access support is weaker and handles errors very poorly.

rad_gruchalski3• 2 years ago

What does Excel do here that Google Sheets doesn’t?

Tables.

ChicagoDave6• 2 years ago

If you do any serious financial planning for a startup or small business, Excel is vastly superior to Google Sheets. The multi sheet formulas can get very complicated and web based tools can’t perform as well as desktop software.

lostlogin4• 2 years ago

I balance my checking account

Assuming that this relates to checks/cheques, are they going away in the US?

ghaff• 2 years ago

Many of us still write them semi-regularly although many are "written" by the bank. I admit that I keep my eye on my banking account online but otherwise don't pay a lot of attention day to day. Far larger amounts of cash are flowing through my credit cards than any individual direct payments.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

It's very uncommon to use them for any common expenses like groceries or gas. I use them for a quarterly HOA payment, yearly CPA tax preparation, petty government fines and fees, and donations to charity. Generally things that you mail a payment for and you want a record of the payment. Most of these I could do electronically but I don't really save any time doing so because of the friction of setting up the payment.

owenmarshall2• 2 years ago

“Balancing a checking account” in American vernacular is typically used to mean reconciling the transactions your bank has posted to the spend you’ve tracked.

This used to be more important when you wrote paper checks and received a monthly paper statement from your bank. Most people who “balance” their accounts today seem primarily concerned that they are adhering to their personal budget. But the term remains.

codethief• 2 years ago

One of my favorite tabs is taking a high interest loan or credit card and increasing the payment amounts (even a little) to reduce the overall impact of the interest rate, something a lot of people don’t understand.

Looks like I belong to those people that don't understand: What "payment amounts" are you increasing?

jayd16• 2 years ago

Presumably they're talking about paying down more of the principle sooner, lowering the interest amounts.

ETH_start• 2 years ago

40 years ago the spreadsheet was the killer app of the fledgling device known as the personal computer, and now it's an indelible part of many people's daily life.

kjellsbells4• 2 years ago

Reading these comments, I think I might be a dinosaur, but Excel (native, Windows) has a really good keybindings UI (you press Alt, and all the key choices light up), and the ability to record actions as macros and then inspect the code is absolutely gold for automation. I know VBA is profoundly uncool and all that, but boy, if there was a better native IDE inside Excel with Copilot helping me along, I would be throwing money at Microsoft right now.

cmgbhm• 2 years ago

There’s a lot of finish in the Microsoft products.

Views are so much faster to pick settings in Excel. You can format tables and indent them (nested ledger) You can get higher information density.

It’s always amazing to me to wade through “how to x” in Google and see 100s of people asking for years.

Google docs and numbered headings is one of those.

eviks4• 2 years ago

The alt chords are the only good part of the keybinding UI, otherwise it's all bad unergonomic combos and difficult customization

alwillis4• 2 years ago

I use Numbers for my day-to-day spreadsheet stuff, part of Apple's iWork suite with Pages and Keynote.

The UI/UX is so much better than Excel's and you can export to .xlsx format.

Don't get me wrong--there are some projects that require the functionality that Excel has. Using it gives me 90's software PTSD but sometimes you have no choice.

jimnotgym14• 2 years ago

And what do you do for a living may I ask? Accountant, Actuary, trader? I only ask if you are using some of the advanced features, which is where the others start to fall away.

Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure

alwillis4• 2 years ago

Numbers is a fine way to keep a shopping list, or a household budget, I'm sure

Don't be fooled by the marketing—Numbers has 90% of Excel's core functions; it even had RegEx before Excel did. IMHO, Numbers UI/UX is dramatically better than Excel's.

Of course, it doesn't have Excel's advanced features or access to plugins or to Python scripts. The users who need that know they need Excel… but you can go surprisingly far with Numbers.

Like I originally said, there are some tasks where you absolutely need Excel.

jpalawaga• 2 years ago

I'm the opposite. I cannot stand Apple's productivity software, and I get irrationally mad when something tries to open those.

bigjump• 2 years ago

The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked!

https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe

Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!

rezmason• 2 years ago

You're cleared for takeoff: https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg

jimnotgym14• 2 years ago

I like the programmers on here telling the professional users that Excel is overblown and they could just use Numbers, OpenOffice or Google sheets.

Imagine an accountant coming on here and telling you that you don't need vi, emacs, sublime text or VSCode. You certainly don't need your IDEs. After all it's perfectly possible to code in Notepad.

You also don't need your languages. BASIC was perfectly good.

The killer feature of Excel for financial modelling, over 'proper' software, databases etc is portability and auditability.

Everything I do at work is subject to external audit. Every audit firm in the world has Excel. The tax advisors have Excel too, as to the tax authorities. Apprentices are trained in Excel. The people I hire may not have used our ERP, but they have all used Excel. It is the one constant in our world. The actual accounting records are in an ERP, but all of the outputs are in Excel. I have worked at several multinationals and several SMEs. Excel was everywhere.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

I would temper your hot take. Nothing you described is a feature specific to Excel from what I can tell, and using Excel in front of an ERP is most likely an anti-pattern as the ERP is meant to handle reporting and authorization in a centralized way.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

Nearly everyone who knows how to use a computer knows how to use Excel to some extent. That is a feature of Excel that pretty much no other software solution can bring to the table.

jimnotgym14• 2 years ago

Ha ha ha

The power of ERP is that it is so rigid and repeatable. Which is great for all the things that stay the same. My country just introduced a law on reporting payment performance to suppliers. My US ERP provider didn't think of that 5 years ago...so we did it in Excel. Say we are in 50 countries (we are in more) each with their own changing requirements... think the ERP could keep up?

But not all of the places in my country are on the same ERP. Many of the foreign places are not (the joys of acquisition!) yet. What do we do in the mean time?

elmerfud2• 2 years ago

Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job. In the beginning when it was a spreadsheet that meant to do spreadsheets stuff it was fine because it fulfilled that purpose. The problem is users who failed to learn any other tool continued to use it for things it was not adapted to do. Microsoft being a company that likes money and it simply being a piece of software means that they could adapt it to do all kinds of things that are better fulfilled by a different tool. Just because they adapted it to make it a database and a spreadsheet hybrid thing doesn't mean it was also the right thing to do. It was the thing to do that made them money and have them capture market share.

Overall it allowed a segment of the population to continue to remain ignorant of all of the other tools available that were better suited to their needs. It also allowed them to remain ignorant for all the methods to relate data between multiple tools that are adapted to do their jobs better.

So ultimately the only people this has really benefited is Microsoft. the users believe that they're getting a benefit but it is actually a net negative because it discourages growth it discourages learning it discourages understanding the best tool for the job outcomes.

It literally is the axiom of if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail personified to the maximum extent possible.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Just because everyone uses it for that purpose doesn't automatically make it the best tool or the right tool for the job.

On the contrary, in many domains in life the right tool for the job is almost always going to be the one that everyone is already using. It's usually not the most satisfying tool or the most elegant, and its use will usually make perfectionists scream, but if you're actually interested in getting anything done you'll default to using the tool that the human beings in the system are already comfortable with unless it would be completely impossible to do so.

As another example: the NEMA connector is objectively bad compared to modern alternatives, but it's not going anywhere. The benefits of standardization usually outweigh the benefits of optimization, and you usually don't benefit from being the first to move to the "better" solution.

(I realize that last part is difficult to swallow for a forum that's focused on startups trying to disrupt the existing, standardized tech.)

snapcaster• 2 years ago

The problem is that most of the time what software engineers say is "better" just isn't.

Suddenly instead of being comfortable using the tool themselves, they have to request engineer time to update the UI. Instead of being able to write whatever weird excel formulas they have they maybe now need to learn SQL. Maybe they "should" but that is kind of besides the point

oneplane14• 2 years ago

Those feelings are nice, but Excel in most context is just a liability. The intersection where a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job, and the job is performed by someone who doesn't have many options is pretty small.

In business cases, the risk with home grown spreadsheet 'workflows' is pretty big, and in home usage cases you don't really need more than just a basic spreadsheet. The intersection is perhaps where you have some offline data, cannot write a program as fast as you can use a spreadsheet and there is no risk associated with taking the data and workflow out of a guarded environment.

The same can be said for things like word processing, when you need a book or a paper, you might be in need of typesetting rather than a program that tries to do everything but at a level a novice can use it. You're not going to get a paper or an offset printed book from a text editor. Perhaps if you self-publish a PDF that doesn't need to meet any requirements you can get away with an all-in-one DIY solution. But the time period where that was relevant (around the late 90's) has come and gone.

Let's not stop there, the same can be applied to someone doing some Apps Script, Python notebooks or other solo yolo work, because it felt faster or more productive to them. Surprise! Your cowboy behaviour doesn't actually work at scale, doesn't fit in a shared system and doesn't work in production. But you wanted to be quick and 'get it done'. Instead you waste your own time and everyone else's time, and didn't deliver something that works. (at work; and that includes "but I have done it this way for 1000 years! - doing it wrong a lot doesn't make it less wrong)

But say you want to do some budgeting at home, and all you need is some boxes to type numbers in, then yes, why not use a spreadsheet. But that's not what people celebrate. People celebrate running a company with 100's of jobs on a single spreadsheet, and probably only because it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. And then there's the real bad scenario, a specialised system (say, an ERP or PIM or CMS) where you pull the data out, do the thing in excel because you didn't want to learn how to use the system and you happen to have written some lists of numbers in excel once and therefore it is now your universal hammer. Good for you, bad for your department or entire business unit because you just broke out of a shared workflow because you thought you knew better which tends to have universally bad consequences.

Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). You could replace Excel with something else and it would still be the same problem (i.e. replacing Excel with Word in scenarios where people want to send someone an image that is on their clipboard - they know they can paste it in Word, so that is what they do and you on the receiving end get a grainy compressed image in a word document). It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.

You can enjoy it as much as you want on your own time. That doesn't make it the great universal fit you think it is.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Excel specifically is an example of "they just don't know any better", just like the everything-is-a-nail example (where Excel is the hammer and every problem looks like a spreadsheet). ... It's not that the sending and receiving didn't work at all, or that the software or the people are bad, it's just a really shitty "solution" that shouldn't be glorified and be seen as the failure to educate that it is.

This is an elitist software engineer's take.

People building on Excel isn't a result of failure to educate, it's humans doing what humans do best—automating their own workload. It's people using general-purpose computers as general-purpose computers. It's the closest to the personal computing dream that we've come, and likely the closest we ever will.

The alternative in the real world isn't "everyone learns Python", it's "we lock normal business people out of computing and keep it in the hands of the trained and very expensive software engineers". That's not going to happen, and it's frankly not something we should want to happen.

I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable. We miss the decades that the company ran very successfully without any software engineers on the payroll and see the giant spaghetti mess that made them finally decide it was worth the cost. But it's important to remember that these same businesses reached the point where they could afford to pay us to build something custom by building a successful business on top of Excel.

Affric5• 2 years ago

Write a piece of software that ends Excel’s dominance and then I will take your opinion seriously.

I hate Excel for many reasons but it is king for a reason.

jimnotgym14• 2 years ago

I think you misunderstand 'workflows' in business. This is not a case of ingesting a large amount of data, transform, analyse etc.

A normal finance team gets constant one off requests for information. Download something from the ERP, lookup against something else, pivot it by department. Then you get a follow up for the same but with x excluded, but they need it in 10 minutes before a meeting. Excel is great for that.

Then there are the dozens of files behind accounting records. Take a Fixed Asset Register (since it is at the top of the balance sheet), a list of your assets and their depreciation schedule. Maybe your ERP doesn't have one, or your company didn't buy that module, or you have a special class off asset that doesn't fit in it. Maybe they coded it for one country, but in your country the rules are different, so it ends up in Excel.

Then maybe you have a bank account and you have cheques that are posted to your ledger but have not cleared the actual bank yet. Then you have items on your real account that you couldn't post yet, maybe someone paid you with no reference. So you keep a little Excel reconciliation to check.

Then inventory, maybe the ERP didn't split it in the way your consolidation needs it, so you transform the data in Excel and reconcile it back

Then you have all the things that belong in this accounting period but haven't been billed yet, so you have a running list of accruals and when they will reverse. Then you have all the things that are posted in this period but relate to later periods, so you keep a prepayments file. Maybe both of these spit out a journal to upload back to the ERP and reconcile the balance.

Then you get a download of the payroll for the month, but you need to rearrange it into net pay, gross pay, taxes paid by the employee, taxes paid by the employer, pension contributions... then you have to split it by cost centre too. This could be coded, but it is different in every country... and the cost centres keep changing, and the analysis head office wants keeps changing... so it goes in Excel.

Then I want to verify that the system posted the correct absorption to inventory, so I paste in an inventory report and a TB and last month's reconciliation updates.

I can code, but I can't maintain 100 pieces of software that change all the time. I also need all the people in the chain to be able to follow it....

And yes, finance people know how to apply the famous 'checks and balances' to keep out most classes of mistakes....and to detect the same mistakes made by the engineered 'proper software' we have to work with.

nuancebydefault• 2 years ago

The reason of excel excelling in being everywhere, is mostly that it has an easy learning curve and it presents itself in the form of 2D tables, like kids have learning to understand early in primary school. Also its VBA macros make it easy to start programming.

If your ERP outputs are in Excel, I guess pdf or csv or html could have been chosen as well, since those are also constants in the world?

foobiekr5• 2 years ago

neither of those are useful for the next stage of analysis.

timomaxgalvin• 2 years ago

These are true, but it's not the reason it's so successful.

It's the original agile, functional programming environment. Code iteration and basic testing is done in microseconds.

I remember laughing very hard when someone excitedly told me about REPL in python, like it was a new idea.

fuzzfactor5• 2 years ago

I found different versions of Excel, and Excel in general, are less consistent ingesting XLS(X) files than tabulated text or well-crafted CSV's.

gus_massa• 2 years ago

I'm using Google Sheets instead of Excel since a few years, and the only feature I miss is Solver.

Andrex3• 2 years ago

It's almost too easy to hit up https://sheets.new whenever I get an idea.

Having to wait for Excel to load up every time would be a killer.

I also really like Google Forms, and use it for tracking things like my piano practice time[0]. The page loads instantly and it only takes 6-7 seconds to log a new time.

https://i.imgur.com/xK6tnJe.png

I don't think Excel offers anything like this.

whall6• 2 years ago

This is exactly right. I work in investment banking and the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures.

If I build a financial model, the 60 year old CFO needs to be able to understand it and agree with it.

One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.

chaps• 2 years ago

Worked for a company whose automated options trading system was an.... excel spreadsheet. Every now and then I would need to RDP to a machine to RDP into another machine to restart it. Pain. So much pain.

s0rce• 2 years ago

I'm an engineer/scientist and I find it super hard to follow other people's excel files. All you see if some data/numbers instead of the actual code/calculations.

deepspace• 2 years ago

60 year old CFO

As a 59-year-old, I am extremely disappointed in your insinuation that people our age are unfamiliar with modern technology. We built the foundations for all the cool stuff you whippersnappers take for granted, including Excel.

makingstuffs• 2 years ago

One other aspect is all of the shortcuts and hot keys. If you switched to a different software you’d have to relearn shortcuts that you have been using for several years.

This! I love Cursor’s IDE but, boy, does it really sh*t me off everytime I update it and they remove the keybinding for CMD + SHFT + L.

Like, seriously, you couldn’t chose a different combination for your added feature’s shortcut!?

It’s not like the ‘find all instances of’ shortcut is some hidden, unused gem, which you have to tickle the Gruffalo in order to access! It’s one of the most important shortcuts!

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Well it might be replaced by another spreadsheet. Maybe one that does actual innovation. I don't think people in the 80s ever thought that Lotus 1-2-3 would go away.

3abiton• 2 years ago

the reason I believe Excel will never go away is because of how easy it is to follow extremely complex financing structures.

Can you give an example? I am unaware of such power.

Karellen5• 2 years ago

Excel spreadsheets are auditable?

If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them?

https://theconversation.com/spreadsheet-errors-can-have-disa...

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+excel+spreadsheets+contain+e...

MegaDeKay4• 2 years ago

Yes. Auditable in this context means something that can be examined by a financial auditor. Auditors understand and can check through Excel but they don't understand code. It is not on the auditor to guarantee that what they are looking at has no errors. Their statements on their audit reports say as much.

In my old job, we had to switch away from our working but ancient Information System to SAP for similar reasons.

valar_m• 2 years ago

Excel users can make mistakes, therefore Excel spreadsheets can't be audited? Is that your point?

x0x0• 2 years ago

Now do software in general.

jimnotgym14• 2 years ago

Because there are so many spreadsheets? My team probably created 100 last week.

Now think of 100 pieces of software that you are confident are 100% error free?

foobiekr5• 2 years ago

Spreadsheets let you click any field and understand where it came from. Excel can be thought of as an amazing post-execution debugger where you can get a previous output and value for almost any piece of memory ("cell"). I would love a debugger that could do this post-execution for some output.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

If that's the case, why do studies show that so many Excel spreadsheets have major errors in them?

Your point, which is completely true, is not incompatible with GP's statement.

Excel is ubiquitous in the corporate world and most spreasheet in the corporate world are completely full of errors everywhere.

Not just errors but also broken assumptions.

I've been tasked with porting a spreadsheet to a dedicated app because people noticed numbers were off and, oh the clusterfuck. Never again.

The world started making much more sense to me from the moment I realized most business decisions were taken based on powerpoint presentation containing numbers coming from broken Excel spreadsheets.

__mharrison__• 2 years ago

The ability to audit doesn't necessarily mean that the "code" in a spreadsheet is easy to read, only that it is easy to see...

danielmarkbruce6• 2 years ago

Financials are auditable. Code is auditable. The fact that something can be audited doesn't mean it will be, or will be done well if done.

JetSetIlly• 2 years ago

I totally agree with this. I've always found debugging Excel spreadsheets to be a real challenge.

I work in accountancy and while its possible to audit the output of the spreadsheet, (as I'm sure it's possible to audit the output in other domains) as an erstwhile Software Engineer I can't help but think it would be better if I could better verify the integrity of the spreadsheet itself. It's far too easy to introduce unnoticed errors.

Other people have different views on this but I love the idea of spreadsheets but I don't like any spreadsheet software. I think there's massive room for improvement. But if you were to ask me how to improve it specifically, I couldn't really pinpoint anything.

I had a go at doing something in this space to scratch a very specific itch but of course, it doesn't address any of my complaints here. Rather, it tried to tackle another of my complaints - the lack of good support for different number bases https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Ivycel/

listenallyall4• 2 years ago

Software is both testable and auditable, and yet, bugs still exist! Even in open-source code which is also freely and publicly reviewable.

nradov2• 2 years ago

And it's not just a matter of functionality: there's an enormous difference in performance. I've had to push the limits of Excel to do data analysis and visualization on huge spreadsheets with complex lookup formulas. It worked great. Then I tried to import into Google Sheets to share with colleagues and it completely choked. Like I let it churn for hours and it never finished recalculating. Google Sheets is "good enough" for basic, simple stuff but for anything more it's a real productivity killer.

MegaDeKay4• 2 years ago

This. I had similar experiences with LibreOffice. It can choke on what you'd think were pretty mundane and reasonably sized things. I imported a CSV file of 15K lines once and it used all available memory on my PC doing it. The optimization that goes into Excel is one of those "unsung hero" things that doesn't get a lot of glory but it is clutch day in and day out.

Affric5• 2 years ago

I worked in a place where excel was used for ad-hoc calculations. We became a Google shop.

Sheets was a piece of junk compared to excel. Anyone who did any real work rather than just looking at a spreadsheet or using a template got Excel back in about a week.

ianand2• 2 years ago

Google Sheets does struggle past a certain size.

For Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need (GPT2 Small implemented in Spreadsheet, ~1.25GB Excel file, 124M parameters), I have only been able to get the complete model working in Excel.

In Google Sheets, I've only been able to get it to implement a single layer out of the 12 in the model. And there's no way it can handle the embedding matrix. And it randomly quit during tokenization.

That being said, I am a fan of both Excel and Google Sheets. In Google Sheets the formulas are easier to read, and for teaching my class, it's great because students and I can be in the same sheet at the same time during a lesson.

I also tried LibreOffice briefly. While it could open the Excel file, it was unable to save it (it crashed during the save process).

m463• 2 years ago

I remember my attempts to use numbers on a mac to pull up some spreadsheets.

It was SO. IMPOSSIBLY. SLOW.

Maybe it's different now with M4 macs, but I still remember a friend telling me that response times above 1/10th of a second were not interactive anymore. Made total sense after that.

1_1xdev1• 2 years ago

It's unbearably slow even opening and filtering a small CSV file (100s of rows).

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

I need you to explain why those other tools are like notepad instead of just another IDE.

Because if you tell me I could get my job done with a different IDE, I would say yes that is correct.

(And they use pretty much the same mess of a formula language. I reject the idea that using not-excel is like using BASIC on top of using notepad.)

Krssst• 2 years ago

And if my IDE made it harder for me so save a file to it could nudge me into saving it into its cloud I would definitely run to other IDEs.

chaostheory• 2 years ago

The real problem isn’t with Excel itself. The problem is VBA and even Microsoft has been trying to kill it with JavaScript and future python support. I don’t feel that even MS can kill VBA since it’s so ubiquitous on Excel into the day that the majority of users transition to Excel online.

kjellsbells4• 2 years ago

If MSFT are serious about this, they need to make migration easier. Right now they half heartedly point you at javascript and excel plugins and walk away. When Record Macro gives you the option of recording in JavaScript, not VBA, then we'll talk.

rescbr• 2 years ago

It would be easier if they simply port their VBA runtime to WASM and call it a day.

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

What is wrong with VBA? Aside from a few syntax quirks, like no short circuits in if statements, it is a very easy language to learn and use. And, the syntax hinting (IntelliSense?) is incredible.

croes• 2 years ago

Excel problems and errors are everywhere too. Especially when data imports are necessary.

I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.

fuzzfactor5• 2 years ago

I don’t want to know how many decisions are made based on faulty Excel spreadsheets.

And people are aware of it but they don't know where the faults are and need to go forward anyway.

So they must act as if nothing could be wrong, and if something does come up later on it can be treated as a complete surprise to everyone concerned.

With that kind of acting, how about how far the bar has been lowered on even more critical decisions? :\

ksec• 2 years ago

I keep saying exactly the same thing for nearly 20 years. SMEs, Fortune 2000, and even Governments. The world runs on Excel. And it is perhaps the most important piece of software, more so than Linux or Windows.

You could change ERP, you could change CRM. But there are always something important stored in Excel spreadsheets that no one wants to touch or transfer to something else.

dartos• 2 years ago

“Entrenched” isn’t the same as “very good”

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

Its the same for many aspects of engineering, equally applies. Thank you

mr_toad• 2 years ago

The auditors use it, the CFO expects it, it’s all the interns know. These are reasons to have to use it, not to like it.

At best it’s an arranged marriage, at worst it’s Stockholme syndrome.

iwontberude• 2 years ago

So by your logic, if the entire audit world used Numbers, you would be using Numbers. That isn’t remotely close to the rationale for why we don’t code BASIC in Notepad and is probably the reason why people here find Excel to be a less than ideal choice. We use the right tool for the job, not the tool that all of the industry uses because we would be screwed otherwise.

wjnc• 2 years ago

This hits home. We upgraded a very massive Excel-based model to the peak of our best practice. Proper split in requirements vs. implementation, a separate data quality layer, model validation on the model, Ze Kloud, etc. Turns out accountants don’t grok model validation and I am still explaining imputation on individual data fields to auditors expecting each individual value to be user inputted somewhere. Waving IAS8 in front of your auditor doesn’t help since you are threading on their expertise and that gets messy. Excel models turn out to be multi headed dragons, but you can mail a spreadsheet with five example cases and get by.

bulubulu• 2 years ago

10 years ago I joined a consulting company as a data science intern. I arrived at work with my MacBook. I learned about excel in courses but had never used in my daily life: I use csv and SQLite for "data-heavy" cases and Numbers for intuitive cases (never coded inside it). When someone shares an excel sheet with me, I open with Numbers with no problem.

On day 1 I realized my work was to deal with several excel sheets of 10~50MB, with huge amount of VBA scripts, rule-based highlighting, charts... They even wrote an internally used extension for those files. Numbers could not handle and crashed.

I need Excel. I asked if I could borrow a PC laptop from the company, no, that's not for interns. I need to bring my own device. I asked if they would pay for Microsoft Office to get installed on my personal MacBook. The answer was obvious, what are you thinking? I had to manage to get Excel for myself, while the full salary they paid me was not enough to cover a license.

I left consulting after that experience and end up working as a "real" data scientist. Nothing like that happened ever. I collaborate with colleagues using different IDEs/editors everyday. If an accountant joins us and tells me notepad is all you need, I would highly respect his choice and continue with my editor. We don't need to argue, our codebase is not locked in any tools.

pxc3• 2 years ago

An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She's a programmer, so she could have used a wide range of tools but Excel was what she reached for and it evidently did the trick nicely.

The thing that stands out to me in these stories is that spreadsheet programs are a (1) the most common site of programmability that features in anyone's lives, even non-programmer; and (2) for many tasks, spreadsheets sit at some kind of local optimum in a tradeoff between simplicity and power. (There's surely something for engineers and designers to learn from the second point.)

It seems like a connection worth celebrating, between people like us and the mostly non-programming public— a little piece of overlap between two worlds.

CamelCaseName• 2 years ago

This is a very basic article compared to the conversation here.

Excel is incredible for being so simple to use for even the most basic tasks (Baby names v2.xlsx) to the much more complex data analysis.

As someone who uses Excel for 75% of my workweek, I wouldn't trade it for a 10% comp increase, because doing so would increase my workload at least 25%.

I recently tried moving to Google Sheets and it was unbelievable how slow computationally heavy queries would take compared to Excel, or how painful the lack of shortcuts is.

Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.

So, is it product quality or deeply built habits? Probably a mix of both. Yes, I grew up with it too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

ianand2• 2 years ago

Even things like how cells are frozen (if you're on B2, are you freezing the first row, or the first and second row?) just feels wrong.

FWIW one my frustrations with Excel is how it does freezing of rows. I find Google's appraoch more intuitive. But the issues on computation I agree with (see my other comment on this post).

Andrex3• 2 years ago

As a point of data, I also find how Google Sheets handles frozen rows/columns more intuitive.

WillAdams• 2 years ago

It's unfortunate that folks haven't had the chance to try the various other alternatives --- Informix WingZ had quite nice charts, Lotus Improv was quite different, and only Quantrix has survived, but not many folks get to use it since its so expensive to license a seat. I wish the opensource Flexisheet would be reworked so that it would compile and run again.

nhatcher• 2 years ago

FWIW, I am building another alternative. We are very, very, very far away from Excel. But TBH I think that's true for anything else that is not Excel or Google sheets. Zoho deserves a special mention and lots of other good folks have created fantastic things like rows ir grid.is

theshrike79• 2 years ago

The magic of Excel is that everyone has it and it does enough for most cases.

Yes, some things could be done better with a separate application or custom software, but that requires approval and contracts etc.

With Excel you can just build that crap yourself and share it or not.

pdm55• 2 years ago

Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story.

The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan.

In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise.

More recent times.

Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn't envy him his task.

"Please, not just Excel." I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data.

"Rinse-and-repeat Excel". I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this.

And that's it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I'm thankful that I haven't had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.

PopAlongKid2• 2 years ago

The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets.

There were millions of spreadsheet users by 1986, as VisiCalc was released in 1979[0] and similar programs like SuperCalc[1] were also in use. They were both ported to IBM PC and saw significant use in the corporate world prior to and including 1986.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc

somat• 2 years ago

I grew out of it.

I started to really loath the spreadsheet data model. "it's a big bag of cells" was not really doing anything for me. I started wanting better data structures and programing environments to work on that data.

For the data storage and basic calculations on that stored data role, I mainly use a relational database, most of what I wanted in a spreadsheet was row level security, that is, for my rows to stick together(one to many bad sorts I guess), and relational databases provided this in spades.

jhickok• 2 years ago

I have never really been proficient in Excel and I've always sort of been drawn to Python+Pandas+DataWranglers, but I am sorta interested in Python for Excel when it is released for Mac. I'll at least give it a shot!

ysagal• 2 years ago

Have you tried getgrist.com? It's a relational database that looks like a spreadsheet and has granular row level security. And also the language of formulas is Python.

game_the0ry• 2 years ago

I worked in finance professionally for 7 years before I started writing code for money, so I would say I am very familiar with the tool.

For the specific set of problems it is designed to solve, its like shooting the best sniper rifle ever made -- point, calibrate, pull trigger, win.

For any other problems outside of its scope, its like trying to break the world record for Nurburgring while driving a short bus.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

most people in tech don't get what Excel is imo. start with the idea that it's a fully featured virtual machine that uses a different interface metaphor than a command line or windowing. it's useful to think of it as an abstraction layer where business runs, it's where value is demonstrated. those user spreadsheets are computers/hosts/vms and I'd argue that's often the disconnect between what technologists think they are supporting and what users think should be supported.

of course custom code is better at pretty much anything. I've been a unix user since the bsdi days and so to me spreadsheets are a cruel toy running in a blue tinted mental prison, but when you see excel as a different and sophisticated UX metaphor for a fully featured machine that the user uses for raw arithmetic computation, and as an alternative to a command line or a browser, it's much easier to respect. that's absolutely essential for understanding it and its users.

the thing about excel is if you don't use it i guarantee you work for someone who does as the tabular metaphor is the system of the world. even if reality is more complex and needs more complex objects to model it, human beings ultimately organize around the contents of spreadsheets. hand wavy, but I don't know how else to tell developers and product people they need to take excel seriously.

skydhash• 2 years ago

Most people do get that and why it's useful. But it's like ssh-ing into a vm to do anything in production. It works, but goes against any engineering principle we have. We write bespoke scripts and I think no one would begrudge anyone trying to do quick a quick computation on anything tabular. But then you got complicated business processes that are held together by spreadsheets and it's a nightmare scenario when you know how much people trust the computer. It's easy and fast, but we'd like some more reliability.

cafard• 2 years ago

It may well be on HN that I read so-and-so's rule: It doesn't matter what the users say they want, they want Excel.

Gratitude and an upvote to the person who can attach a name and citation to the rule.

fancy_pantser• 2 years ago

here ya go ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665282

klausnrooster• 2 years ago

See https://www.felienne.com/public-appearances and ctrl-f for Excel. Especially the videos, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY . Then have a gander at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...

analog313• 2 years ago

I work adjacent to a mid sized engineering department that develops both hardware and software, for measurement equipment.

The managers use Excel, as one might expect, although at this point it might be equally accurate to say "spreadsheets" generically. I'm not sure how many of them use advanced features that are unique to Excel. They will use the one with the least friction. With that said, Excel probably still has the most finely tuned UI.

The traditional engineers use Excel. Very few of them program. The ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, have joined the software industry. The rest are pretty adamant that programming won't get the job done quicker or more reliably than Excel.

The software engineers use Excel. They're good at whatever their role is within the software team, but they use Excel for the same kinds of short-term or one-off problem solving that everybody else uses it for.

Do some spreadsheets get too big and unwieldy for their own good? Sure. But that would also be true if you let the managers and traditional engineers write their own code for solving the same kinds of problems. I know this because I write that kind of code. Nothing will ever bridge the gap between small and large projects, that exists in most mature organizations.

sno6• 2 years ago

Excel is great but there’s a large audience who would benefit from something simpler and more intuitive. That’s what we are trying to build at Klaro (klaroapp.com)

Eggpants• 2 years ago

My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators.

I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat/lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set.

I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations.

A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing.

Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on/off with color.

Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone.

I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.

keithalewis3• 2 years ago

I wrote something to make it simple to embed C++ in Excel. It is useful for pushing business logic into platform independent code that can be integrated into back end production systems. One bonus is the original spreadsheet has unit tests vetted by the business users. https://github.com/xlladdins/xll

johnea• 2 years ago

Yea, people grow up with rashes on their butts too, stop glorifying this steaming pile of s/w doo doo...

teleforce• 2 years ago

Fun facts, when Excel was launched by both Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft back in 1985 at Tavern on the Green, New York, Excel has 16,384 rows and 256 columns, and now original Excel's rows now exactly matched the Excel's current columns of 16,384 (2^14).

Another fun facts, on average people spent 10% of their working life using Excel.

'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel

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