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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can't say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it's an absolute monster.
(it's essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
Mostly horrified.
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can't be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i'm the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet's script and the guy who originally created it doesn't work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don't get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it's still in use, but yeah.
“Only a trainee…”
Sounds like you’re the only one keeping that thing running. Don’t sell yourself short!
my boss does appreciate what i'm doing but i just don't have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
Until it has an odbc connection to a sql server or access db it’s still low level wizardry.
you can access sql from excel? i am now officially horrified.
Next time you open excel go to the data tab and look at all the things it can do.
It really shouldn't do those things, but it can.
Since the 90s for a lot of it…
You can issue queries, import and transform the data on demand.
Including running a 3D graphics engine... with raytracing
I once saw a post on reddit where a bored guy in his office stream movies from his home PC to Excel.
It's turning complete, so it's should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I'm not sure, if it's autocorrect or misinformation, but it's "Turing complete", after Alan Turing.
It’s as in once you try it there is no turning back
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It's one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
Shame you can't just buy it.
You can. It's expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.
I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don't need PowerPoint or a word processor, I'd rather it not be included in the price at all.
Also, they've made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that's the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that's a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
You can turn that off now.
What do Excel and Incels have in common?
They assume everything is a date.
How about an Excel with Python scripting? That would be awesome.
Not sure if you're joking, but that's a thing. You can just insert python scripts into a cell and have their return values be the cell value.
From: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot-python-in-excel-errors-7736520d-47ef-43a8-b640-d826afb63249
... so?
That sounds like pychart to me!
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can't tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace "New" Outlook is.
For Microsoft, "Modern, sleek, streamlined" are just marketing terms for "We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you'll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development."
Those are different categories of problems.
Excel really does too much. Biologists literally renamed a genom because Excel kept turning it into a date. If any other database did that, the vendor would hear a friendly but stern "get fucked".
They're using a spreadsheet and getting burned when it acts like a spreadsheet. It's like complaining that a screwdriver did a bad job hammering nails.
Yeah, that's my point. Excel is almost never the right tool, but since it's doing so much, it can be used for almost anything, just in a very shitty manner. And in reality, it is used for almost anything.
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn't reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don't want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there's probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can't exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
Outlook really has a lot of obscure features that not many people used. I think it's good for them to cull these less used features and later re-add them rewritten in a more supportable manner.
I also really appreciate the emoji-reactions because I don't have to type out a response expressing that I have read and acknowledge an email, I can just give it a thumbs up and move on, and they don't receive a whole email to read, they just see that it got a thumbs up and can move on too
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
PowerPoint is actually ridiculously powerful software
I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.