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Comment by coinerone | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried to open an Excel Sheet from 2002, that one that is existencially important for the whole success of the company :), with makros as big as the Windows Codebase itself, in Libre Office? I can tell MS Office will not leave the field.

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Don't you even get me started on xls from 2002. That pathetic standard was poorly supported even my MS itself, files were opening with great difficulties and differences even on same version of Excel on different PCs, and sometimes newer versions could not open them properly at all. Once I have discovered that one .XLS file could internally have different types of encoding within one same document.

Anyway. It is clear that MS Office will not leave the field, like FORTRAN, but the key principle is the same: if you want to get out of the pit, you should stop digging. DO NOT create new spreadsheets in XLSX format. DO NOT ever send out MS Office documents. That's it, simple rules. Follow them for 5 years and you'll wonder, how little you depend on MSOffice.

Yes! Im with you on that. But it is not the tech or IT "Poeple" that we are talking about here. This Discussion is going on for many years now and there will be another 10 Years of "simple" solutions. I will be honest here. As a Programmer and Application Supporter (for 17 Years now) i earn Money with that kind of Problems. I dont like MS and it would be a joy to switch to GNU/Linux. But i think i will see someone standing on Mars before MS Office will be replaced.

Just have to move to an adjacent/another field. I have not seen Office in ten years, and haven't used it in twenty.

Recently got some UX whiplash after being in engineer world for years and long ago migrated to .md/.rst over rich text editors. To quote the Matrix, "I don't even see the markdown anymore, I just see bold, italic, header..."

Then I started working with some folks on a Covid mask project and they are massively struggling with MS office docs, dropbox, file versioning, web deployment, wordpress, for something that needs both high uptime and fast updates. I'm like why not just use git, github, and jekyll static sites? Add better looking pages in time.

...

Lets just say they weren't thrilled with that idea.

Sticking to open formats (flat text, odf) is a great start for the individual but it's still a workflow shift for everyone else, which is painful. It was a start reminder for me of the frustration I experienced when shifting my workflow to more open standards. Add to that some serious Hyrum's law when it comes to excel usage.

> if you want to get out of the pit, you should stop digging.

Great quote, I'll try to remember that.

Also, folks forget how times change. Ten years ago most were still trapped on Windows. Today a lot fewer are.

Sounds like something a human wouldn't have any use looking at anyway. Multi gb excel files? This is what programming is for.

> Multi gb excel files? This is what programming is for.

Excel is arguably the most successful programming language ever, or at the very very least second most successful after JavaScript.

(Note to future commenter: I said "most successful", not "best".)

Yeah excel, outlook, etc, and their db-app, access, word, and photoshop, adobe, etc, will be tough beasts to either man handle or convince, I guess.

Looking forward to handle being a terminal app to install all of those things. Throw us some games too.

No manual entry for handle

Excel is a very nice purely functional programming environment with a fantastic debugger.

Excel is a nice flight-simulator, it's just too bad it doesn't wear a miniskirt.

Edit: here's the procedures to activate a flight sim in excel 97 as I understand https://kb.iu.edu/d/agqw

You can fly around using your mouse or the arrow keys. The monolith lists Excel 97's developers.

Reality does not work in the way you wish it to.

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