This thread surprises me. Excel is fine, but I've seen people do so many silly things with it that it makes me dread having to use it. It's like they treat every cell as its own special little canvas... Oh, you wanna randomly change the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd-Mmm-yy mid-column? With Excel, anything is possible.
The best way I've heard it explained is that excel is too good at doing too many, but it isn't the correct tool for many of those things. Since it's good and accessible, people make it work and then you get this jumbled mess of stuff after time passes.
This thread surprises me. Excel is fine, but I've seen people do so many silly things with it that it makes me dread having to use it. It's like they treat every cell as its own special little canvas... Oh, you wanna randomly change the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd-Mmm-yy mid-column? With Excel, anything is possible.
Maybe I just don't work well with others.
It doesn't help that Excel tries to be "smart"
Oh, putting in a lot#? Let's make that a date.
Most people don't set up an excel for what they want, they start using excel with what they have
The best way I've heard it explained is that excel is too good at doing too many, but it isn't the correct tool for many of those things. Since it's good and accessible, people make it work and then you get this jumbled mess of stuff after time passes.