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People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other.

My mother self-learnt excel, first as a to-do list, then a money tracker, then she learned some simple equations to keep track of weekly spending.

How in R would someone do that? With a nice graphical view? I agree Excel has many many issues, but people use it because, in my experience, it super easy to use and in particular let's you easily mix data and code.

People are also learning excel because that's the only way to program in a big company without going through "official IT", which won't listen to what you have to say if you're not a $100 000 project they can offload to a third-party.

> People aren't learning excel because Universities are part of some Microsoft conspiracy. They are learning it themselves, or from each other.

At least in germany children are often forced to learn excel in school because the official curriculum includes "office software" which is an euphemism for "microsoft product training". This has certainly not developed from necessity. Even someone who thinks school should only be a preperation for the job market would agree that employees who are able to help themselves are better than ones who know how to use a specific version of Excel.

I'd rather everyone was taught Excel than a very minor set of people learn spreadsheets by themselves. Barely anyone uses spreadsheets in UK it seems

I'm really not against teaching spreadsheat software since it's a really useful tool. I just don't like that it's thought very microsoft specific and in depth. Students could benefit way more from some basic computer (science) literacy.

> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel.

Every time a business user sits at a computer, are they going to spend 10 minutes getting it done, or 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get pip env configured so they can maybe eventually get it done? If by some miracle they are supernaturally gifted at programming and succeed after some weeks, they now have:

  - a nonstandard file format that will eventually break 
  - no real time feedback of formatting or calculation as they input/manipulate data 
  - no charting 
  - no GUI 
  - no "undo" button 
  - no import wizards 
  - no support (but I guess someone light years ahead of any dev talent I have ever seen wouldn't need it)

And all of this for a single use case.

Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Excepting the awful ribbon UI redesign, you could take any Excel 97 user, put them in front of the latest M365 version, and they could get the same work accomplished in the same amount of time.

You cannot say the same thing about almost anything else in the tech industry. Excel is terrible in a lot of ways. But it's a mostly reliable tool, has worked approximately the same way for 25 years, so people are going to use it and teach it. There's no point in wasting someone's valuable time with the horrifying fragility of the python/R/whatever ecosystem.

there are languages that have better support with dependencies though, e.g. Julia (every time I have to debug dependency issues in some other person's Python code/requirements.txt, I find myself wishing it had been written in Julia). I'm not disagreeing with the overall tenor of your post, but I do think there's a medium that's possible to strike here: maybe something like a simplified DSL in Julia, or something like https://www.visidata.org/

> Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity.

Sigh... "Microsoft has". Time was, spreadsheets was a generic category of software, made by lots of different software makers. Nowadays, it feels like people not only don't know this, but can hardly even conceive of the possibility that "spreadsheet" could mean something other than "Excel". At least I think that more people are still able to think of, say, word processors or presentation software as not necessarily Microsoft products; the spreadsheets battle seems to have been their most crushing victory in the "Office" or "productivity software" wars.

It's sad not only for the IT world in general or from a free-market perspective, but for spreadsheets in specific, too: Who knows what stuff like Quattro Pro or Lotus Improv would be capable of now, if they were still around?

True, however Microsoft is not to blame for the management errors of others, and there are other spreadsheets on the market still.

Except instead of trying to be the C++ of Spredsheets, they target Go like capabilities, and then wonder why business keeps adopting Excel.

>It's not hard to code, children do it.

It is hard to code, and average children don't do it. The fact that exceptional children do it more than they do other adult things is because coding doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment and you can afford to do it as a kid.

Yes, and also I think also because it is possible for it to be a self-isolated system; you don’t need as much greater context of the world to make sense of its rules.

I strongly disagree with this. It is easy to code and any child or adult can do it. The typical problems we solve with code are hard, and can only be solved with code.

Consider the quadratic formula. It's trivial to write this code. That's not a hard problem to teach anyone to solve with code. Or calculating compound interest. Or solving payroll and basic accounting.

All these things are done with spreadsheets as the abstraction instead of code because of the myth that "code is hard." Code is not hard, it's just we use it to solve problems that are so hard we can't do it with spreadsheets.

The steps needed to convert the quadratic formula to code are absolutely not trivial, unless you're a geek. If I went to my mother trying to tell her to code a quadratic formula, she'd have no idea how to do it, even if I explained everything.

Spreadsheets are hard too.

> It's not hard to code, children do it.

My wife knows R and Python. 90% of the pain of any new project is in environments and dependencies. Some weird error message shows up because there are multiple python executables on her machine or it isn't speaking with jupityer properly and we are on a wild goose chase of googling and command lining.

For excel, you open it and run.

Even if you know how to code, setting up a coding environment has enough "wtf does this mean" roadblocks for nonexperts that it becomes a terrible experience.

>>> It's not hard to code, children do it.

I think a paradox of programming is that we know it's easy, yet we also know that a certain fraction of people -- perhaps a majority -- will never grasp how to do it effectively. And the ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, aren't sticking around in low paying administrative jobs.

And coding well enough to really replace a spreadsheet without making something even worse is yet a higher level of programming skill.

Given the virtually ubiquitous knowledge that programming skill is of market value, I think the existing proportion of people who can program is indicative of how many people are potentially capable of it. I don't know a single manager or engineer who doesn't think that learning a little bit of Python would be useful.

Wow, I don't know how you arrived at the conclusion that coding is somehow easier than excel. Excel/Google sheets is tabular wysiwyg and about as simple as it gets... even for children who get acquainted with tabular data relatively early (reading simple scientific graphs, etc)