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Comment by mikegerwitz | Hacker News Reader

One doesn't need Excel to answer those questions. It has convenient GUI features, but it can also be efficiently done in a variety of languages made for processing of data (or even simple command-line pipelines), many better for the task. That's also a good application for teaching about SQL and databases. These yield broader skills that can be applied more generally.

In any case: I hope schools don't start with Excel, since that cements students in relying on proprietary software and Microsoft's suite of software. If they teach it as a generic spreadsheet program---e.g., the same things can be done with LibreOffice---that's another thing.

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You expect your average high school student volunteer to be comfortable with command-line pipelines or be briefed in that vs. just using excel??? The conceptual overhead for a beginner vs. the payoff is just not there.

Command-line was just an example. In some instances, a seemingly difficult problem can be solved trivially with standard tools found on most Unix-like operating systems like GNU/Linux.

But if we're talking about programming, then we're not talking about putting some formulas in Excel---that's what I'd expect of far less technical positions, ranging from accounting, to data entry, to your average person looking to understand some simple data a little bit better. Someone trained to use Excel is stuck with morphing problems into Excel's domain rather than being able to apply general building blocks to other problems.

You can do some pretty complicated stuff in Excel that requires strong technical skill; I'm not implying otherwise.

> a seemingly difficult problem can be solved trivially with standard tools found on most Unix-like operating systems like GNU/Linux

You forget how difficult is getting to the point where you can "trivially" solve problems at the command line. For one you need to be aware of the tools' existence and then understand their functions and how they cooperate and fit in together.

That is the job of the teacher.

My argument is that time can be better spent teaching general skills than teaching students how to be locked into a single proprietary program and try to force certain topics into its domain so that they can use the tool familiar with them (Excel) to solve the problem.

It should be the job of the environment. While i agree about learning general skills, Let's face it that Unix commands just aren't discoverable outside of the curated list by a teacher or other resource.

I never understood Excel or any other spreadsheet's database features (as in "why such a convoluted thing?") but we did have set theory in high school. There must be better environments for such data processing tasks. If there isn't, one ought to be devised. (There used to be DabbleDB for some time, but that's gone now.)

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