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Comment by cateye | Hacker News Reader

What surprised me the most is that most developers can't actually use Excel properly. Most developers struggle even with really basic Excel operations while a lot of non-programmers can do advanced and useful things with it.

For exampe: We used it once as a bug tracking tool and all business people could easily work with it while developers didn't understand that they should use the drop-downs in the cells to define the status and not type something in the cell. We had to continously fix the sheet and explain the developers. While they were complaining about Excel,it was obvious that the lack of basic knowledge of how to use it properly was just lacking.

The same is true even to a greater extent for Word processors. Only a small part of the users can properly format a document with a correct usage of headings and sections.

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True. The problem is people share the bug tracking spreadsheet over email, and you have to find out the latest version from inbox. I still don't know what the best solution could be for both business people and IT people. For word documents, I write in markdown and check in to git which allows me to compare the difference, etc. And I use pandoc when I distribute it as a proper document.

A shared Google sheet works well for most people.

People do this in my company even despite us having SharePoint which has decent enough support for collaborative capabilities and should in theory get rid of any need for different document versions, but that escapes many people.

This seems like a conversation from 2010. I'm not saying that to insult, but it's literally the kind of conversation I was having in a corporate environment 10+ years ago. Now, why can't you just share the link to the Excel spreadsheet and work collaboratively on the same document? If it's stored in SharePoint or OneDrive, this is trivial. There's a "Share" button in the top right corner, and you can do it from Windows Explorer as well. There's little value in emailing versions around anymore, particularly internally.

Your example is a bad one in regards to users, be it devs or otherwise, but is a good example of how half-backed software is then given as example. In your case, if the goal was to only get values from dropdown, then make those cells behave properly. Constraints are easy to implement to allow only get values from dropdown and no typing allowed.

So I'd blame the original developer of said Excel form instead of its dev users.

What you say about word processors is pretty accurate. I'm pretty sure I can use word well enough, but I always just end up writing markdown because it's pretty much impossible to screw up the formatting with that.

Ha! I literally did just learn about column filters the other day, after many years of coding.

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