Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

I love shitting on M$ as much as the next neckbeard but how is Excel terrible? It is still the world standard when it comes to GUI spreadsheet software and all of the other competitors are at best acceptable facsimiles up till they reach a certain cell count that Excel is capable of far exceeding.

No argument from me on Teams though. That is a dumpster fire.

View on HN

Excel is a good spreadsheet, good data exploration tool, passable data wrangling tool, horrible data interchange format, and a completely terrible application platform.

When people are hating on Excel, they typically hate the latter two, not the former three.

No argument from me there. People should stick to using Excel for it's intended use though I would argue it's in some ways a massive credit to it that despite all of it's obvious shortcomings in many other usecases, non-programmers find it so intuitive that they try to use it as a general purpose programming platform.

i think another common assumption is that excel is for normal people, and programming is for smart people. A lot of people don't see making formulas as programming.

This might be a blessing in disguise. People are hilarious competent at complex and highly intricate tasks whenever they're unaware as to the fact that what they are doing is in fact complex and highly intricate - Minecraft being the most obvious recent manifestation of this phenomenon on mass.

As a data scientist I encounter problems all the time when someone opens up a CSV in excel and then saves it. A common thing that happens is that gene names like SEPT5 gets changed to a date

I can see why that would be annoying but it's a tradeoff between how many people would find the automatic categorization of a cell useful vs how many would find it a nuisance. I'm not a spreadsheet wiz but I'm pretty sure it would allow you to set a column to interpret input as raw text.

Apparently science found it easier to rename some genes!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4

But the only automatic characterization to a cell is always in a date. It has a 50 % hit rate and you always need a ritual to stop it: delete the contents of the cell, set the cell format to your desired format, insert the contents.

The problem is, MS thinks they know better than you what you want, and even if they guess it 95% right (and they don't), the rest causes so much frustration that its not worth it for audience like HN.

Its pain point with Office products since 90s, a classic example from that era (and 2000s) is doing a single newline in Word and reformatting whole 100 page document into useless mess. If they would make a clear easy option to just turn it off with 1 button, same for grammar corrections, it would make life easier for everybody. But no, MS knows better...

Yeah, I admit I find the tendency for MS products to autocorrect anything it can infuriating but I guess I'm just not their target audience which is why I stick to FOSS products and operating systems.

I tend to use org-mode's table feature and if I need to export stuff to common formats, pandoc.

I was frustrated with this problem for a long time. And, the best solution was to use xlsx :(. Also, in nodejs xlsx package has been incredibly helpful.

How does xlsx solve this? I was pretty sure i've had to deal with this same issue with xlsx files, but maybe I am misremembering...or the problem was introduced as an xls file that was then converted to xlsx.

Gasoline is the world standard for fueling vehicles, but we know it's not the best option, just the incumbent. Something being the standard doesn't make it the best, and perhaps if people innovated over Excel, it could be better.

For what it's worth, I just moved a dataset out of Excel in to a pg database because what we were asking of it was just a hair more than a spreadsheet should be used for. It is great for collecting and viewing data, but as soon as the first complex filter came in, it fell apart. Something that was doable but challenging for me as a tech guy was not possible for my user, a parent. But a data grid with some simple filters and an export will get the job done, and thanks to tools like postgrest (not just postgres) and a React data grid, I was able to make something infinitely more usable than just a spreadsheet.

We can all agree, Teams is awful.

Well I would argue that gasoline is in fact still the "best" option if by "best" you mean the fuel source that balances energy density, ease of storage, and combustibility. Yes, it is environmentally unfriendly but so is the very notion of billions of personal vehicles to begin with, even if they were fully electric (which we are several decades from plausibly achieving).

At the end of the day, Excel is spreadsheet software. This is a class of product that is very old and there are few major innovations really left, which is also why Excel remains the leader. When you have a technology that has matured to such an extent, you are now chasing the margins in terms of improvement and that is where the largest and most well funded companies hold the advantage.

However the next step beyond a simple spreadsheet, the desktop database is still a sector that is quite nascent, especially in terms of products catered towards lay people. As you mentioned, currently databases are not particularly user friendly to the non-technical crowd but products like Notion are making such things more accessible. That is the area where I can envision something emerging that makes Excel or the very notion of spreadsheet software itself obsolete.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com