Hacker News Reader

Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

"Most of the value of Office is in Word"

At that time it was. Lots of business process involved creating documents to be printed, sometimes manually signed, posted and microfilmed eventually. While a lot of internal stuff at corporations ran in computers, interactions between business entities, consumers and governments largely depended on dead-tree flows. Word processing was huge during the 80s and 90s because of that. Nowadays? Excel is what sells office subscriptions beyond the ones sold solely by inertia and brand, backwards compat and brand loyalty

The ease of publishing to the web, and the rise of PDF for printable docs eventually eroded a lot of the value of Word, I suppose.

Email first, then Web.

I'd say that Powerpoint is a large driver too

Many people may not know/remember how common it was for people to use Word to spell/grammar check everything, thanks to Microsoft's strategic decision to only include the functionality in Office. Those little squiggles indicating spelling errors in any (especially browser) text fields didn't arrive on the scene until 2005 or so. As a result, it wasn't unusual to draft an email message in Word and then copy/paste it into your browser. Microsoft also made it an option to use Word to compose Outlook (i.e. corporate email) messages. Microsoft was pretty stingy about features like spell check even in their own OS because they obviously wanted everyone to also buy Office. Word was to text as IE was to browsing in Microsoft's worldview.

I remember thinking it was super cool to have aspell everywhere in Linux, when Windows couldn't get that outside of Word.

Word is to text as the current javascript bloat is to browsing.

Word is just 20 years early and foretelling the fate that are to befell to internet browsing.

Fortunately, site like hn and tools like vim and format like markdown still exists.

This feels wrong though, most of the value of Office is certainly, at least now in retrospect, in Excel. It is a reactive programming language that powers virtually all of FO, MO and some BO functions (i.e. everyone from people on the desk to the people reconciling books at quarter end) while also enabling Accounting/Audit firms, financial services operations vendors, and people actually trading on the desk to do their daily work to perform simulations and program without needing to remember obscure programming libraries if they are not SWE domain experts.

Hard to imagine Word being even remotely as valuable, but maybe my perspective is too narrow.

Excel may be globally more important of a product but, Word is certainly more popular.

Now it depends on how you calculate value.

Why are you so certain? Google trends seems to suggest Excel is more popular:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

People searching for something is reflective of what people search for, in some cases for products it's reflective of popularity but, I would argue in this case there's a good chance people are searching for Excel more for tips/troubleshooting/how to, than purchase intention.

If you look at a range of wide range business functions, opening and editing text documents is more prevalent than using spreadsheets.

I asked you how you were "certain" what you were saying was true.

You haven't provided anything in answer to that, and instead just criticize something that shows what you claimed wasn't the case.

So, please, go ahead and provide data showing what you're claiming is in fact the case.

I don’t think that’s a good indicator of popularity. Most people are going to be searching for “how to do X” with the product name to refine results. Excel is more complex, so likely has more of those sorts of search queries.

Thus, why I asked the person above how they are "certain" of a thing.

Seems like a double standard. Person above makes a claim with nothing to back it, I counter the claim with an actual cite. Everyone jumps on me instead of them, for, providing anything at all?

Google trends indicate that Excel is harder to use without a manual than word, nothing else.

I don't think "in retrospect" is the right ready to look at it. Certainly now Excel is the most valuable part of Office. But in 1998, people weren't doing business by emailing spreadsheets back and forth (at least not like today). They were writing documents in Word, printing them out, and then snail-mailing or faxing them to people. And "desktop publishing" was also a thing back then.

>It is a reactive programming language

I'm willing to bet that 95% of users don't look at Excel the same way you do.

That's a shame, 95% of users are clearly missing out on the thrill of bending a MSFT product to their will, a rare occurrence in and of itself as well as never needing to rely on someone else for data analysis/transformation for their own work.

I worked at a hedge fund briefly (recently) and the rest of the investments/trading group literally didn't know what they were doing in terms of tooling/analysis/etc and that's a separate story lol (seriously - after the fund went from $30mm AUM to $1.2b before I joined, I immediately suggested hedging at least 50% of the portfolio with some puts 3 months out, and the 'founder' immediately said 'no but we are long')

Anyways so yeah instead of advancing the field with my sexy python backend code, sadly I ended up being tasked with all of the new interim strategy, while also needing to find alpha. So while I was writing a core real time risk web app implementation in Python/C, along with a trading system based on some off the shelf tooling with some custom infra by yours truly, I was also tasked with creating a "temporary solution" that was just based on Google Sheets (The Firm™ decided to strategically adopt Google for everything, even though Sheets is garbage) - INDEX/MATCH don't work, and none of the advanced functions work. Of course, building the functionality into Google's little app is not scalable and probably won't even exist in another 3 years, but Excel is just so great if you have a super small dataset that you need to slice and dice for some quick analytics. Then I'd just port over the functionality to C and write some wrappers to facilitate quick computation in Jupyter Console. Really great reactive stuff. And with xlwings, I could do some quick analysis and then just rip that into my running session and then do whatever analytics I wanted to. Going on a huge tangent here, apologies. But Excel is great and it could be even better if they figure out a more efficient stream-based system to get rid of annoying hangs while you are processing a larger dataset, especially if there are many complex formulas embedded in the sheet (again, obviously this can be handled by constantly dumping the data and then re-performing analysis on the derived dataset without all the insane, nested Excel formulas across a bunch of cells).

Pretty sure a minimal implementation of Excel with INDEX, MATCH, FILTER, ROWS, SEQUENCE ( & and maybe TRANSPOSE for good measure ) would be Turing complete.

EDIT: This went super off-topic. I apologize, but basically moral of the story is... if your requirements are ambiguous, your friend Excel is there waiting to help. Just gotta know your tooling and learn all those weird functions you think you normally wouldn't reach for!

EDIT2: Avoid computers if possible

I wonder if the rest of it is in Excel or Powerpoint?

Excel. There are many good Powerpoint replacements, and few competent Excel ones.

I’d argue that Powerpoint has negative value overall. But I suppose technically Microsoft still gets positive money for it.

Slide presentation software in general - or PowerPoint specifically?

I think PowerPoint has simultaneously been the best - and the worst - thing to happen to academia in the past 100+ years, and PP has only been out with good MM projectors for only the past 20 years - it has tremendous value. It’s only a bad thing when people aren’t using it correctly - though I appreciate that good software should be difficult to use incorrectly.

(okay, next worst thing after Blackboard).

Slide presentation software in general. It is perhaps OK to present simple subjects to a crowd with the aid of visuals such as slides, but the more complex the subject is the more the slides will impede understanding. Think of the slides used to present technical data about foam hitting the Space Shuttle to managers at NASA just after the launch of Columbia. They were garbage in several ways, but chiefly because they had only nested bulleted lists rather than just paragraphs and sentences.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

It is possible to lie using ordinary sentences and paragraphs, but slides pile on even more ways to deceive. They encourage you to break up the flow of information into optimistic headlines and soundbites followed by fine print that is easily ignored.

Slide decks are humanity’s most dangerous invention. We should teach our enemies about slide decks. When we meet aggressive aliens, we can sell them Powerpoint to slow them down. Too bad our own military already uses it; I’ve read that all of our high–level military planning is done by Powerpoint presentations.

What I usually see are poor attempts to replace Powerpoint, usually with coding in JavaScript or basic HTML features.

As usual, most people attempting to replace Office don't get the features that are actually available.

Apple Keynote is good though.

Yes, fully agree, that is however also most likely not on the list of Powerpoint haters.

I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives - you need only look at Excel’s embarrasingly long UserVoice page to see the myriad of small little bugs and missing functionality that make it extremely painful to use, but will never be fixed because it breaks backwards-compatibility or just because “reasons”.

Amongst my personal peeves are: inability to do non-integral scrolling; no multi-statement functions or inline-variables; still no sane and consistent CSV support; and still no TryParseDateExact and TryParseCurrency functions - using Excel when you want to use ISO 8601 consistently is painful.

https://excel.uservoice.com/

Excel recently got variables with LET and functions with LAMBDA

> I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives

Which are they? Libreoffice calc has a lot of jagged edges, google sheets is very slow on even modest sheets.

Complaints show the opposite of what you think it does. People are using it despite the flaws because it is irreplaceable.

There are the programming languages everyone complains about, and the ones that nobody uses.

Most popular does not equate best quality. It means just exactly what it states: most popular (within a target audience). All too often, something less popular is better in one way or another but does not gain traction. For example, because if network effect or because of monopoly abuse.

FWIW, I can do everything I need with LibreOffice. It even runs stable on my Mac. However, on Citrix, my employer does not have LibreOffice, so I gotta resort to MS Office. I gotta work with the tool which is tge default, my choice of preference be damned. Which is rather standard. And students learn to use MS Office because if massive discounts. Bail 'em in when young, and you get lifetime customer. How I ended up staying with my bank post student years.

Capitalism is an imperfect fitness algorithm, but it is pretty damn good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com