People love excel and Photoshop. I’ve never met any heavy excel user that prefers any other spreadsheet software or even has anything negative to say about it.
The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now.
The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up.
On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago. The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well.
They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.
Er, I think reality is closer to "they would be making significantly more money if they loved python more than Excel".
A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair.
The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants...
But if fully half (admittedly a subjective assessment on my part) of a tool's users would be better served by not using that tool for one reason or another--that's a pretty significant subset.
- lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA.
- weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to fix it. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel
- lack of decent built in formula tracing (ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree). There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in.
- lack of a decent way to see what’s changed between two versions of a spreadsheet
I’d also say there’s an inordinate amount of abusing Excel to do database tasks out there. People have spreadsheets which take minutes to recalculate which could be done in less than a second even using Access, let alone a ‘proper’ DB.
In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.
With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.
There is a lot of bad enterprise software out there, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are basically catalogs of it. The fundamental problem as I’ve seen it relates to contracts and integration. Good software, the user can bail at any time.
There is a very simple set of red flags: the company doesn’t list a price, you have to talk to a sales person, and you have to sign a long term contract. I’m not aware of any software that fits those three that is enjoyed by its users.
The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.
Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined.
Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone. Somebody needs to get over himself.
But anyway, this is very obviously off-topic. I don't think it serves the wider community to continue this conversation so I'll leave it here.
Put another way, that Bob thinks he's dealing with "big data" doesn't mean he is in fact.
Photoshop. I think it’s a tiny little more mixed opinion of the overall program in terms of UX, but again, the closest replacement might be Affinity. And that is too new.