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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on tools the employees learn once and never look back.

Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.

The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath, because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.

Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.

Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.

I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.

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> The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp.

Another one: Excels stubborn insistence on mangling anything that can be somehow construed into a date into one :-/

Format your column prior to pasting data, paste special > match destination formatting

the most solid way to handle it is to use data import from text file (handles csv) so you can configure the columns while looking at them

Which recent excel versions you can bring that data table directly into power query as well, which is useful if youve got multiple csv you are trying to look at that are related

> onboard onto

Another way to say this is: "learn".

i think 'onboard' might refer to the wider context of using a tool in say, a research group. it's not just you learning the tool, it's about how the group uses the tool and the historical developments in place.

It's just a tech business language mannerism. People use it for the same reasons they use "price point" instead of "price", or "usecase" instead of "use", or "form factor" instead of "size": to show that they belong to the tribe, and to sound clever while saying something that could be expressed more simply and elegantly. The jargon adds nothing, except cringe.

Another way to say this is: "con". But language changed. It's almost as if it's defined by what's spoken, not by what's in a dictionary.

Another way to say this is: "teach".

People who code for a living are used to regularly teaching themselves new things, but there are lots of folks in other corners of the organization that expect to be taught / onboarded, and it's not an entirely unreasonable expectation. I think the word "onboard" implies a cost will have to be paid (e.g. time, money, man-hours, hiring new talent, etc.), and that's what the parent poster wanted to emphasize.

worked with a lot of techs this way. They get mad if you show them what you're trying to teach them shows up with very good instructions on the first page of google. At least half of them get pissed off :)

You’re right about Office being sticky, but that is changing. Heaps of people are using Google Sheets for basic spreadsheets these days. Advanced users will stick to the tools they know, but I’ve reached the same conclusion as the author of this post. Licensing issues, nagging about cloud subscriptions, inconsistencies between Windows and macOS and the lack of Linux support have become so painful in recent versions of Office that using LibreOffice no longer feels like a greater inconvenience – just a different inconvenience.

At least LibreOffice runs on Linux/Windows

In my experience anyone in CS who was doing enough work for which Matlab and R to be relevant definitely found them useful, at least in the correct situations.

Proprietary math software, to which I'd add Mathematica, has the specific non-value proposition that you cannot take home your precious research work from the university lab without expensive, hard to buy and impermanent licenses and subscriptions.

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