Excel is probably the single most used piece of business software in the world. People have been able to make quake. People have done 3d rendering without vba. People have done all kinds of stuff with Excel for a while now.
Probably the worst example I've seen first-hand was an entire retail banking loan-approval process running off of a single, shared, gigantic spreadsheet, that hundreds had tinkered with, but no-one understood or took responsibility for, and where the accompanying Word document of "things not to do" was bigger than the workbook.
Even yesterday, a friend of mine discovered they'd underclaimed expenses for a total >$1,000 due to a dodgy spreadsheet. Something as simple as pasting a list of dollar amounts from a webpage into Excel can produce an incorrect SUM() if/when trailing spaces creep in, since the resulting values may be treated as strings and evaluate to zero - and so it had transpired. Not even "text to columns" could fix it; you have to a) know about this lurking monster, b) use formatting to make it casually evident, and c) use Replace to strip the whitespace. What a crock.
But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.
There's some real doozies out there. The Reinhart-Rogoff error, which was used to justify imposing austerity on Greece [0]. The UK's COVID tracing fiasco [1]. The list goes on. People using Excel have no business making decisions that affect other people's lives.
[0] https://stanfordreview.org/clarifying-the-implications-of-th...
Also - 15 digit NUMBER precision leading to truncated values that you only discover when it's too late; no Macro undo; no way I'm aware of to transform columns/rows from formulas to their values without intermediate cut/paste steps; lots of essential features (like "Copy only visible range containing hidden cells") buried in Find & Select > Go To Special menu without keyboard shortcuts; Excel's magic ability to change cell data types by merely touching a CSV (open/closing without saving changes)...
And often the easiest way to try a few things and communicate the idea is by prototyping it with a spreadsheet.
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment of Excel's ubiquity, I'd argue that Email is in fact the most used piece of business software.
To add to you list, back in the 80s, I wrote a simple x86 assembler, and a simple neural net, in Lotus 123.
At this point they can just as wel get rid of the different GUIs facade and instead implement some contextual interaction model (and hopefully they'll include an API so we can generate these documents programatically and don't have to deal with this nth clippy generation :) )
An official solution would be nice though. These open source projects are popular enough to warrant one I'd say!
Yes, there absolutely is.
You can create a document with styled text in Excel instead of Word, just as you can edit a photo in Paint instead of Photoshop. You can do it, but the two tools have dramatically different capabilities.
It's important to think about developing for use-cases otherwise we will end up with overly complex software that aims to be all-things to all-people.
This is exactly what I believe the current state of the MS Office applications to be.
The interface and/or implementation isn't always ideal for the purpose you would generally use a specific app for, but the functionality is there.
> dramatically different capabilities
Embedding a fully functional Excel spreadsheet is only a few clicks through the ribbon and some frustration away in Outlook, Word, and even PowerPoint.
This is effectively opening a reduced version of excel in a very limited way, primarily for embedding one document in another and allowing limited editing. You don’t get the full functionality of the other application.
I can see why I would want to change the axis on a graph even after I have pasted it into my email, but why would I want one app to be both my spreadsheet and my email inbox?
Are you a user of office suite? I spend about 70% of my work life between excel, PowerPoint and Word and have never once wanted them to be one app, but quite often have wanted better integration.
In regards to PowerPoint, I imagine it lags pretty far behind in usage compared to both Excel and Word. Not many people are making presentations in the grand scheme of things. My intuition says that it's mostly upper management and maybe a single person in a group using PowerPoint "often".
Notes are usually smaller with simpler structure and formatting. With notes, it helps of the app gives you a way to organize the notes. This is really a different use case.
I’ll go for latex if something has to be published and certainly use power point a bit but am always on the lookout for new approaches. It’s great that power point can pull/receive graph data.