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Comment by pietromenna | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: what turned Microsoft into what it is today was not Windows at all. It was Office, and specifically Excel.

It is the best of breed on the category by far.

But yes, only used by those who can't code.

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I use Excel all the time, and I absolutely code. But I agree with your opinion here - Excel was (and to a certain extent still is) a major engine for Microsoft’s growth.

I dont even see it as an opinion. I consider it as a fact.

There are possibly trillions dollar worth of revenue around the world relying on Excel. And one reason why other office software couldn't match MS Office. Even if you promise 99% compatibility with Excel, no one wants to risk 1% of messing it up just to save a small amount of money on MS Office. Especially when MS now offer it as subscription which fits most business P&L better than a one off purchase.

And that is a reason why I see a small possibility of MS one day open sourcing parts of Windows.

Unfortunately Excel on Mac isn't as smooth / performant as Excel on Windows.

Excel Online isn't much better. I often jump to desktop version because online version just isn't the same.

I'm not sure where you get the idea it's only for "those who can't code". In my domain, mining, there are many, many excel sheets for all sorts of things that would never merit a single line of code being written. We're far from the only. Sure, at a certain scale and below that for certain types of projects, switching to code and databases make sense. Other than that, it's just plain smart to use the labour saving tool that is Excel.

> Unpopular opinion: what turned Microsoft into what it is today was not Windows at all. It was Office, and specifically Excel.

> It is the best of breed on the category by far.

But would it have been if MS hadn’t controlled the playing field for WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.?

Excel makes a good user interface for quick scientific apps... it used and extended a fairly complex radiometric analysis program at NASA/JPL that was built in Excel and used VB scripts for most of the calculations.

I made the same app in both Matlab and Python/Qt and it took far more time in both of those than it did in Excel. Time is money...

It is used by those that can code too.

if data.length > 1000, code it else spreadsheet

If think it is more like, if I have to share this process with people who are non-coders, then I'm going to use excel.

I think almost the opposite. Excel is useful for quick exploration or entry of data. If I need data entry from many people, a web spreadsheet can be useful, too.

At the point that others will be dependent on the output, I want version control and tests. You can make that happen with excel but it's not easy.

Yes, or, do I want to be on point to maintain this until the end of days? If no, use Excel.

Absolutely, if you're generating any kind of ad-hoc reports for biz/marketing folks it is often a much better to implement it in a way that they understand and update than to write your own code to produce it.

"Paste the export from {business system} in this tab, then drag down column F in the first tab to update the vlookups." Boom, no more 5-minutes-before-the-board-meeting-can-you-just-rerun-this-report-with-different-parameters emergencies. For the most part.

This is how I do it as well.

I use excel and autohotkey for automated asset data entry into a remote desktop program.

Why not run excel locally and file copy?

> But yes, only used by those who can't code.

In what? Excel has versatile uses, it can be used for both analytics and analysis of data. You can make dashboards, pivotcharts, etc. in excel in minutes when doing the equivalent will take you hours, if not days, to code from scratch.

I always figured it was Excel and Outlook. They basically lock businesses in.

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