Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel?
Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.
Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Also, there's a TON of .xlsx files in the wild with years of business knowledge and processing. Everyone uses about the same 50% or so of Excel, which is captured in Google Sheets and any other spreadsheet. It's the extra 20% that everyone else uses -- and it's a different 20% for everyone -- that causes the issue of entrenchment.
In addition to the things you mentioned, Excel is an offline, native app, with much more speed and efficiency when dealing with complex or large spreadsheets, IMO.
Those things. I literally run and pay for Parallels on my Mac for the Windows version of Excel. (Mostly for the keyboard shortcuts.)
But Excel is used because it's very very good. Many of the people use it need this one small weird thing, and Excel has it and none of the others do yet. And that one small weird thing is different for everyone.
It's a bit scary to see how much stuff is kept going with scary hairballs of VBA and macros and god-knows-what.
The EUSPRIG has more information. For example, this about spreadsheets in clinical medicine: http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicin...
I use both on a daily basis. Our org is on the Google Apps for Business stack which is why I use Google Sheets, but I'm considering getting us on Office 365 for the collaboration capabilities of Google Sheets paired with the functionality and advanced features of Excel.
Simply put, Excel can do way more, is faster, and frankly, takes less time to do things in because I'm deeply familiar with it from years of repetition and troubleshooting. There's also WAAAY more documentation and tutorials available for it when you do encounter a problem.
There are semiconductor fabs running most of their machinery on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.
The resistance is rooted in psychological / political reasons, not technical ones.
Excel, 1-2-3, Visicalc are, taxonomically speaking, in the same class.
We have a new order of tools. While they have their own inherent risks, they reflect literally decades of thinking about the risks and limitations of tools whose lineage traces back to Visicalc.
Macro management and security, versioning, distributed access, multidimensionality; all are addressed in a handful of ways with Alpha, Tableau, Looker and other progressive tools.
Excel, floppies, line printers; relics.
Excel is faster to get started. But for advanced tasks, the time it takes to learn Excel / R is about the same.
A big reason why people don't make the leap is because they already spent too much time becoming an Excel expert. Indeed, for young analysts with no baggage, a lot of people learn and use R instead.
Or is your aversion mostly to the M- word?
I find it funny that when it comes to vi vs emacs (or any such similarly geek-approved thing), fans of each will jump up in arms about the precise reason their platform is better, but the same kind of people would not want to take hundreds of thousands of business professionals at their word about why they like using a particular piece of software.
Also office workers can't always be trusted to even plug things in let alone properly assess what an optimal solution looks like.
People used to use Excel to run regression, visualize data, etc. which I consider inferior to R / Python.
I can't speak about other uses of Excel, e.g. financial modeling, insurance.