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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this week, someone was passing this tweet around the office, which I believe captures the cold truth succinctly:

> "All enterprise software competes with Excel.

> All productivity software competes with emailing things to yourself."

https://twitter.com/pavelasamsonov/status/110653418815977881...

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This is disappointingly true.

You'd think we would have come up with better answers. I'm constantly looking for ways to better manage bug tracking, todo lists, and even managing job searches and professional networking, because I'm still not really happy with anything I've found.

As I bounce back and forth between different tools, I always land back on just using Excel or Google Sheets. I'm never entirely happy with those either, but I find that they're no worse at the job than the dedicated tools.

I kind of smile at it, fwiw.

It's a sort of tribute to users-know-best and a "I made it so I understand it" mentality. Spreadsheets are a rare example where people make their own tools in a modern work environment, where most tools are highly politicised.

For me, I'd like to see spreadsheets improve at the tasks they're doing, not hand over to some cookie-cut app procured by management.

to close the loop: https://twitter.com/patconnolly/status/1116722347849977856

re: spreadsheets and recursive publics ;)

Have you given notion a try? It sort of feels like one of those tools that are so general they can actually compete with spreadsheets and emails and simple lists. And pretty user-friendly to boot. I have started using it for more and more simple lists and other personal stuff.

I have, I like the product and I agree about the user-friendliness, but it doesn't quite do it for me.

Actually, I should phrase it a different way. For me, Notion competes with OneNote, and for my personal use they're somewhat comparable. Notion doesn't take the spot of Excel/Sheets in my toolkit because Excel/Sheets can be gradually automated out of initially fuzzy requirements.

I just looked at notion, and it's unfortunately not general enough to warrant making a version that works on a non-mobile device. I'll check it out when I can use a version on my desktop (or at least on the web).

Notion has MacOS and Windows versions:

https://www.notion.so/desktop

And importantly, you know Excel/Sheets well probably. Other tools start at a major disadvantage in that they're competing with a tool you're familiar with. That's a powerful adversary.

I would place my knowledge of Excel/Sheets at the level you'd expect from a typical programmer - I don't know the keyboard shortcuts, but I know how to make pivot tables and write formulas.

My main issue is that the specialized tools always impose some sort of opinion on how ____ should work that is close to mine but different in impactful ways. Case in point, JIRA. With how infinitely customizable the columns are, it might as well be a spreadsheet with links to email threads.

That's selling JIRA short on how much the UX tries to do for you, but I'm intentionally making a point about how much overhead there is in paperwork generated by the fact that you're using JIRA. When I compare how much paperwork JIRA saves me vs. how much paperwork JIRA generates, I often find, even as a PM, that I come out behind. As a developer, I pretty much never feel like I'm coming out ahead on time.

I don't mean to pick on JIRA specifically because every bug tracker I've used has this problem, but JIRA was the tool I had to use for work for the longest time, so I wanted to stick to what I experienced firsthand.

This is very, very true in my experience. After years and years of trying out all, I keep coming back to a list of tasks in a sheet so I've combined the two. It's just so easy to reconfigure or query. And with Google Sheets on my phone, it is portable. Add an IFTTT note widget to add a row to my sheet and I've got instant capture. Finally, you can do whatever you want with it using Google apps script (e.g. send reminders). It's hard to beat. Despite all the capabilities, I still keep it simple and focus on capture and review. I could switch this to a list in a text file or on paper very easily and maintain the core of my functionality.

I always think "people built cathedrals and pyramids without all this fancy software, it isn't the key to getting things done".

At my current job we were supposed to have switched to Rally. However, the PMs prefer Excel. The result is that a spreadsheet on the PM's computer is the real system of record and sometimes things make it into Rally. This is a terrible experience. I've abandoned both systems and just work on whatever I feel like. Luckily I have enough clout and a slightly unique role that I can get away with doing this. I feel awful for the devs who are supposed to be working on the normal dev tasks.

Interesting, I don't relate much to either of the statement (not that my experience negates its applicability for other people).

On a bit of thought, I find it useful to organize and break down things and maintain lists (the daily/weekly list habit works best for me currently). This is different than emailing things to myself because I maintain an actively curated list that's hopefully logically organized in big and small tasks.

On the enterprise software front, I am a linux-friendly software engineer, so commandline tools are my best friend. I am not sure Excel can ever beat the productivity of vim+linux tools, let alone other specialized tools like sql. One thing to note is that a lot of time I deal with production data, so its a huge effort to actually move data to excel.

I tried using sc where I usually used excel but the learning curve steep and I didn’t stick with it, have given that a try?

What's sc?

It's a text mode spreadsheet program. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc_(spreadsheet_calculator)

How very true. I know almost every person who uses Excel on a regular basis would kill you if you tried to take it away (I heard one proposed change to openoffice for price reasons; no more).

And I have found keeping a todo.txt file on my desktop is still better than any productivity software. Although, these days, it's a symlink to a cloud-storage folder on my various machines.

And here I was thinking that only I emailed things to myself all the time. Its true that there really is nothing that I've found to be easier than emailing things to myself.

Meaning just how awesome email and Excel are!

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