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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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

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