Surely they have to use stuff like mathcad or equivalent to be an engineer? I've never really used it but it can't be that far off just doing the calculations in python. I think there's "sagemath" too availabe for linux - i'm sure that's not as good as mathcad - but aimed at the same thing i think - and i'm sure it will interoperate with python libraries and R and stuff like that.

I know there are people who claim to be "good at excel" well i only used it for about 15-20 years but then i guess never got "good" at it - i just learned moreabout how bad it is. . Those that were genuinely good at it , as far as I think, did a lot of extra work to mitigate the limitations or create crutches for it. I just got pissed off by it, so i was quite desperate to stop using it as much as possible - it's just only recently i've been allowed to use what i think are more appropriate tools- and i;m grateful for this small, but likely closing "window" f opportunity.

If they're happy with it though, who am I to judge. But if I was doing gemoetry and engineering calculations and ultimately cad, I know i'd not want excel anywhere near my data or my calculation methods.

I wonder if age is really their issue, or if they just DGAF - again if that's the case, good for them.

I on the other hand will probably be walking out when they force us on windows 11 however good or bad it is. /management has already fucked us with sharepoint and dynamics - so maybe i'm just as bad as them when it comes to new fangled shit like: clouds, data-lakes, fabrics and other MS shite. I just want our data on a proper fucking filesystem, that we own. And our data somewhere I can SQL it.