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Comment by stefannn | Hacker News Reader

What still astounds me after 2 months of researching this space is that every day I learn about a new way people store what they write. The other day, I was talking with someone about how he stores what he writes in an Excel file. It's like Abraham Maslow said "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

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Once upon a time, even before the world wide web, darkness covered the land and me but a fledgling was tasked with editing my boss’s business letters. As VP of engineering he was a man of letters. Many letters. Templated letters for my boss was organized in the ways old managing engineers oft are.

Lotus 123 he wielded for engineering calculations and thus Lotus 123 was his weapon for business letters. No spell check of course. No line breaks either. Such was my editorial lot.

Please keep off the grass.

I had a civil engineering coworker send me a flowchart in Excel. I was somewhat impressed.

Jim Harbaugh, a very successful football coach, uses excel for everything.

https://floqast.com/blog/jim-harbaugh-microsoft-excel-fanati... and a funny interview about it https://twitter.com/barstoolbigcat/status/115845032170801561...

Jim Harbaugh advises his quarterbacks not to eat chicken as it is a 'nervous bird,' and is 0-5 vs. OSU. Excel might be the most reasonable thing he does.

What about WordStar on DOS?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502

What I'm trying to say is: it doesn't matter what the tool is. If the process / outcome are worth it, then starting to write is much more valuable than the exact tool (that you choose to get the cool kids nodding their heads in agreement). Productivity is cool.

I don't get it. There seems to be a sentiment in these comments that older → ill-suited; ill-suited being the actual reason why the anecdote about Excel is noteworthy. WordStar on DOS is a word processor. It's old and uncool, sure, but it's not ill-suited for the task in the way that Excel is.

Someone below mentions that Excel is probably an "upgrade" from a typewriter. What. Sure, Excel has undo and arbitrary text insertion, but so does Photoshop. Ask yourself if Photoshop would be an upgrade from a typewriter just because it's newer. At some point, the impedance mismatch wrt the actual task it was conceived for is so great that it will dominate any equation related to suitability for a particular purpose. So even the most recent version of Excel is still more ill-suited for writing than things actually made for writing, like typewriters and old word processors.

I think Excel can be considered an upgrade on the physical typewriter. Yet, some people still write books with those. Whatever gets you there.

Excel is great when you have a lot of small notes you need to reference and you need a quick and easy way to structure them. Write in an editor and then paste in Excel.

I use a AHK(Autohotkey) script which pops up a single input text, and saves my input in a textfile (or a html file) which resides in my Dropbox folder.

That seems unnecessarily contemptuous. Presumably they had some reason to use Excel? If they had Excel, they most certainly were aware of Word...

it is not about hammer and nail, but about infinite plane. You can wrote in one column, like in Word document, then expand on side if content needs it. Second thing is use of images, shapes, arrows, lines, circles - sometimes image is better in conducting thought than words. About plane, if you start with some thinking and it branches out, in excel there is no problem.

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