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Comment by lapnitnelav | Hacker News Reader

The issue that I've seen with Excel is that it's often seen as the hammer -everything is a nail- for people that are less inclined with technology / set in their way.

They will use it both as intended, a spreadsheet for calculations, usually for reports.

But also as publishing software (think InDesign) and format their spreadsheet to look like an invoice / quote, a hand made Gantt chart (yeah with arrows as delimiters, as opposed to filling the cells), etc ...

It's both a fascinating and horrific thing to behold, something that wouldn't be out of place in a H.P Lovecraft story.

We're going to try to get the Gantt folks to modernise a bit and use a dedicated tool for planning but we already know it's going to be complicated to get the senior folks to even consider it.

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> But also as publishing software (think InDesign) and format their spreadsheet to look like an invoice / quote, a hand made Gantt chart (yeah with arrows as delimiter

Meh, I think I've done all these things myself at some point.

I'm very familiar with Excel, so sometimes it's easier to throw something together using a tool I know well, rather than get (or maybe buy) and learn new software.

Dan Bricklin himself said in an interview (I think this one [0]) that when they created VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program) with Bob Frankston, they designed it to mix data and non-data. It was entirely part of their vision of a malleable information space. Of course at some point of using it for everything any tool become the wrong tool, but most of the time users creating sophisticated layouts in a spreadsheet actually use the spreadsheet as intended in the original, powerful vision of its inventors.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIxvrX4lyk

A lot of it is a matter of perspective.

"As intended" is a suggestion, not reality. Physical reality doesn't have XML tags attached to things, saying "this is a hammer, you shall use it to drive small nails, and small nails only". The same thing applies to software. There are tools more and less convenient for a task, but ultimately it's the task that matters.

Consider invoices: before computers, they were done on the ultimate universal medium - paper. Even today, they exist as documents primarily meant to be read by humans. They have some required information and vague shape they're supposed to resemble, but that's it. It's much faster to make one with Excel than with InDesign, doubly so if you already know Excel. The part that Excel doesn't support - invoice life-cycle management - can be done elsewhere (file system is damn good at it), and often isn't even a part of the task - that aspect is handled by the accountants you CC when sending out an invoice.

Excel is really a kind of smart virtual paper with affinity for grids. People use it for a lot of weird things because it usually works damn well for those.

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