by iechoz6H on 10/28/24, 12:47 PM with 367 comments
by jimnotgym on 11/2/24, 8:01 PM
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.
by mannyv on 11/2/24, 3:56 PM
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.
by standardUser on 11/2/24, 3:23 PM
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.
by CamelCaseName on 11/2/24, 8:53 PM
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.
by ChicagoDave on 11/2/24, 6:56 PM
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.
by pdm55 on 11/2/24, 9:58 PM
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.
by xbmcuser on 11/2/24, 4:09 PM
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.
by MostlyStable on 11/2/24, 3:47 PM
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.
by kjellsbells on 11/2/24, 7:17 PM
by vlovich123 on 11/2/24, 3:12 PM
by Eggpants on 11/3/24, 3:40 PM
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.
by analog31 on 11/3/24, 2:00 AM
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.
by wslh on 11/2/24, 4:25 PM
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.
by game_the0ry on 11/2/24, 11:26 PM
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.
by alwillis on 11/2/24, 7:39 PM
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.
by pxc on 11/2/24, 8:03 PM
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.
by bigjump on 11/2/24, 7:46 PM
https://youtu.be/-gYb5GUs0dM?si=vzOGscnTURqhdyDe
Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!
by terminalbraid on 11/2/24, 3:43 PM
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.
by klausnrooster on 11/3/24, 1:26 AM
by throwaway106382 on 11/2/24, 3:35 PM
I’ve never done anything crazy heavy with it, but functions and stuff work fine for me I guess.
by coffeeshopgoth on 11/2/24, 3:48 PM
by motohagiography on 11/2/24, 11:45 PM
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.
by somat on 11/2/24, 10:27 PM
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.
by NeoTar on 11/2/24, 3:29 PM
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.
by keithalewis on 11/3/24, 4:13 PM
by 486sx33 on 11/2/24, 4:12 PM
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.
by teleforce on 11/4/24, 12:44 AM
Another fun facts, on average people spent 10% of their working life using Excel.
by WillAdams on 11/2/24, 8:55 PM
by cendyne on 11/2/24, 3:40 PM
by theshrike79 on 11/2/24, 9:53 PM
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.
by cafard on 11/3/24, 1:05 AM
Gratitude and an upvote to the person who can attach a name and citation to the rule.
by ETH_start on 11/2/24, 7:14 PM
by smallerdemon on 11/2/24, 3:22 PM
by johnea on 11/3/24, 6:21 PM
by Apocryphon on 11/2/24, 3:32 PM
by sno6 on 11/3/24, 3:05 AM
by vl on 11/2/24, 3:50 PM