Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not trying to be rude to you. I'll believe you that you worked there, worked on excel and maintain contact with people still htere and that people are "working on performance" and you can believe me that we just can't see the results of that work.

But yes, I'm a bit jaded. I think you'll understand why that is too. The vast fortune in revenue that doesn't fix bugs put me off excel in a big, big way. That was 2008 or so.

Here's Andrew Gelman in 2013 on the topic:

"Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its desirable features. The disaster that is Excel seems like more of a mystery."

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2013/04/17/excel-bash...

We've heard from microsoft so many times they have people working on all those bugs too. I remember the sheer disappointment in testing the newly fixed rand() function after all the fanfare by filling a page with =rand(), conditionally formatting when negative to be red and seeing the page turn largely red after a couple of F9 re-calculates.

I simply don't believe that excel programmers are idiots and have been for 15 years.

That leaves "they say they're working on it but they are not, not really." At the top of my alternatives. Is there a better one you can suggest?

Enlighten me please, how does this epic cluster of fudge happen? You were probably there while it was ongoing.

Parts of excel work well, /all/ the stats should have been removed 15 years ago as unfit for purpose and zero will or ability or effectiveness in getting a fix and making good.

Excel, just don't. That is a pretty reasonable response, don't you think? Yeah it's sad. I don't relish it but let's not pretend it's all ok, yeah? But I guess the masses of revenue keep coming in so I guess it is all ok from microsoft's point of view. Are you ok with that yourself?

Um, there isn't an easy way to say this, so I'll just say it: calm down.

I'm an Excel and VBA guy. The IDE hasn't been updated since office 97. It's not great.

But the thing that Microsoft understands iS that people buy your software if it doesn't break their workflow. Backwards compatibility is the most compelling feature when you've got an install base in the millions.

Now, they have fucked up. A lot. There is a bug that counts 1900 as a leap year. The statistical functions don't work. They can't dump VBA no matter how much they want to. They tried with VSTO and officejs but nobody is buying. I get it. They are stuck and the only real way out is to break compatibility. But haven't we seen what happens when you go down that road. Python 3. Perl 6. Acrimony. Discord. And for what? Your spreadsheet to break and you have to debug it? What if you have a spreadsheet that's never been documented with a million formulas. You probably have a day job, you need your tools to work and Microsoft understands that.

Saying "calm down" like that is spectacularly rude and derogatory, did you mean to or was that an error? If you want someone to get angry that's exactly how you do it, fwiw. Anyway maybe you're not trying to just turn it into a flame war? Sure, ok. Let's just address those points as coldly as I can manage.

1. "The Ribbon" The most useless, workflow breaking, unwanted garbage change I've ever encountered. No exaggeration. A change microsoft dropped resources into instead of fixing the bugs, sucking time from users and upping their stress and frustration levels. It's the poster child for workflow breaking. Excel. A higher microsoft priority than fixing bugs. Contrary to your claim they clearly understood that they had enough market power to force it on users breaking their workflow and make the users pay for it.

2. Microsoft love breaking compatibility. Every damn upgrade of office somwhere else by some other customer meant you couldn't open a spreadsheet containing a single column of numbers because it was "incompatible." You had to request they convert it and re-send if they knew how and probably you or your employer would be forced to upgrade to avoid that hassle while get slugged with the ribbon you didn't want.

No upgrade treadmill anymore, now they can just charge you yearly without having to play that awful upgrade treadmill game. They don't have to fix bugs either, as we agree and they don't. They chose not to. So that needs to be pointed out every time it comes up to counter a little bit of the horrible stealth of it.

They did /try/ to fix rand() with much fanfare by breaking it different but no version issues. Was broken, is broken, never use it. The only stats function I'm aware of they tried to fix? Really? No? Like "sure, but maybe some people are dependent on getting wrong results and allocating resource based on error?" Is that really the excuse for not putting a tiny part of that mountain of money to stop kicking customers? It's objectively awful. Compatibility with utterly wrong that anybody relying on that wrong has a massive issue.

1900 isn't a leap year and dates are stored as number of days since Jan 1 1900 so fix it and every single date rolls back a day, hilarious and everyone forgives that including me. Stats functions are not like that at all and do not require version changes. Just the will and resource to fix them. What is needed is to actually care.

So that leaves your quote:

"They have fucked up. A lot."

That one stands up. But I don't think you've really embraced the depths of the disaster that is excel and why we should encourage everyone to avoid it. Because (to paraphrase) the error is quite deliberate. It's not worth it to them to fix. They know the bugs are there. They no the bugs are material. They no the bugs stop the software for being fit for purpose but they'd rather not spend the resource, which they could do quite easily. They give software a bad name with that attitude. Are you really happy with it? Really? How much harm do those bugs do every day, in your opinion?

Excel, just say no. Really. I'm sorry if you hate hearing that and you were proud of work you did there or whatever. I was pretty bummed when I came to that realisation myself.

Microsoft earned a reputation with regards excel and they maintain it, even if it seems they don't maintain the actual software.

The 1900 leap year bug is for Lotus 123 compatibility. Nobody cares about that now but it was critical in the beginning - Imaging moving to Excel and all your dates are off by a day.

These days it sticks around because of compatibility with older versions.

This sounds a bit like Comic Book Guy. For every person who has the opinion that Excel is “so crappy” there are probably 100 like myself who place it in the highest category of application software quality, with applications like Gmail and Adobe After Effects. You can prepare a list of weaknesses of any of these, the same way you could write about all of the mistakes that Michael Jordan made in basketball games.

Accesibility has a quality all of it's own. Literally tens if not hundreds of millions of people can do computational tasks they otherwise would not be able to do.

Considering the "every(wo)man" approach it ability to be useful is near genius, but just because your volkswagon won't get you to mars, it doens't make it crap.

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