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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.

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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.

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