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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is how little it improved 1992-2022 (well 1998-2022 to be fair).

It quietly became a thing you could open a spreadsheet from a network share, and so could someone else, and both live-edit it in realtime with markers for where each other is. Not just two people, either. Then gained that with SharePoint cloud backing which means the people don't need to be on the same LAN. And gained a web version which can be scripted in JavaScript instead of Visual Basic for Applications, and so desktop and web users can open, view, edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. With the Microsoft365 backing, someone can @ you in an Excel cell and M365 will email you about it to alert you. Spreadsheets are accessible from the MS Graph API and with a REST interface[1] which means they can be generated and updated from code while on M365, it means Excel can be used as a backend calculation engine in a supported way now (instead of running it headless on a server in an unsupported way), and spreadsheets integrate with PowerAutomate[2].

As I've said several times on HN, Microsoft has quietly made Office Cloud a company wide multiplayer gameworld thing, and hardly anyone seems to have noticed this new category appearing. It's not "store your files in the cloud" or "spreadsheets in a browser", it's something much more deeply integrated. If you thought it was hard to get away from Microsoft Office before because someone might send you a spreadsheet with weird formatting, this is the kind of moat/lockin which will carry Microsoft another decade and over Chromebooks and Android and macOS and Linux desktops.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/power-your-ap...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flow...

That is a fantastically perceptive and compact analysis. Do you have a blog or anything? Tried to stalk your username I think maybe you’re using it might be a play on a Doctor Who actor or something.

Thank you; I don't have a blog, just use HN and Reddit as sinks for opinions. My username is a wordplay on a radio telescope near Manchester, England, which I visited a few times as a kid when they had science exhibits on the grounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory

I don't see much value in any of this, nor in any of the "improvements" occurring in the last 10 years.

Still Word is crashing regularly when it reaches 100+ pages, and bullets and alike are acting weird. And if the dreaded document corruption occurs, you are good to copy paste the whole in a new blank document.

That people want to pay 100€/yr min for this is beyond me.

But also many of the core features are still broken. The fx formula bar button still opens the 1990s non resizable window with a search function that doesn't do anything, and you have to go through a list of thousands of forumula in a tiny box. They never fixed the bug that corrupts xlsm files (I recommend people to never use xlsm for that reason). They also managed to break things, like it has become almost impossible to copy a chart or table from excel to powerpoint without the whole formating being lost (the biggest pain being red negative numbers).

Yeah, there has been minor improvements. Ditching the 65k row limit, waterfall charts, xlookup (though 20 years too late, people had index/match all over their spreadsheets from day 1), 64bit version of excel. The more recent version automatically spills formula returning arrays over multiple cells, useful for users who can't do array formulas.

But many new features I wouldn't touch with a stick. The BI feature that downloads whole table from a database in memory even if you only need one day and there are billions of rows. I always found tables pretty much useless. In term of UI, they dramatically increased the number of clicks to get to a button (try inserting many shapes in powerpoint or excel, or changing many chart/shape formats, things are deeply nested). If you look at the default formats (tables, charts) have been designed by people who never looked at a corporate presentation.

And there are udf I created that I don't understand why aren't part of the default feature set. A formula to deduplicate a list, or split a text based on delimiters, or to execute a sql query against a database and return an array (I know there are buttons for that, but a button requires manual work every time you need to refresh the data, vs a shift-F9 when it is formula based). And why is it still so hard to refresh a ppt presentation based on numbers coming from spreadsheets. It is one of the most common and basic use.

Perhaps you don't but these are critical features in many businesses. The company I work for does government contracts where we have 3000 line cost models that are shared by 6+ organisations and maintained by 20+ people with daily updates. Without having them accessible by everyone at once, people would be creating daily copies which would need to get reconciled.

it still has locks thou - unless you use the less powerful online version. Would be better imho to have a lock free desktop version of Excel that operates like an IDE where you merge changes and resolve conflicts at the point of merge.

It’s a powerful platform for sure. But having just been in a scenario where 8 people tried to work on a moderately complex sheet simultaneously, the collaboration aspects still suck - Google still owns that.

The sad thing is how little it improved

Lotus tried to re-think spreadsheets with a product called Improv - it was full of good ideas but the product never took off. The product launched on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and then on Windows in 1993.

Here's a 1990 sales video (low-resolution) from Lotus explaining how it works, and how it differs from traditional spreadsheets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

Have had the chance of working 18 month with NeXT computer - best (spirit) of machine ever... Improv was outstanding, but too much so... people couldn't easily adapt their spreadsheet work to the new tools (and on NeXT, in a time when green screen PCs here trying to adopt Windows 3.11 ;-) ) - seen quite a few applications never used to their potential benefits (and just wither away, replaced by less capable partial imitations)

It actually improved quite a bit until Excel 97. By then the competition was dead, so they no longer needed to try.

Everything after the ribbon was garbage. They changed it, for worse, to sell new copies.

gotta say I like the search thingy they put in there where you can just type what you want instead of digging through menus, especially for lesser used features.

Basically the idea of a command palette, although less prominent, I guess. And yes, it's the way to actually use the office suite in general instead of messing around with the ribbon.

I can't agree with this when they've so recently added XLOOKUP https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-...

Unless that was sarcasm and I'm whooshing, I really don't get the big deal about xlookup. It's like vlookup but I'm no longer forced to have the lookup column as the first column in the range? I mean, that's nice, it makes my workflows one or steps shorter, but it's hardly groundbreaking.

What happens if you insert a column in the table you’re VLOKKUPING? It breaks :)

Mildly sarcastic. But it's much more sane than VLOOKUP which makes it feel like a big feature to people like me who always hated VLOOKUP.

There have been a fair few changes that make a large difference if you care about that thing, but nothing earth shattering for all. Being able too define an arbitrary number of dynamic forgetting rules (where there was a fairly strict limit previously) is one change that I really appreciate. I'm sure there are many other such changes that appeal to other people's user of the thing.

I suspect it’s more that the features you would use haven’t changed much.

The latest additions (LAMBDA, XLOOKUP, dynamic arrays, etc.) are kind of a game changer.

Also tables and conditional formatting, which I believe were introduced after 1997.

I never found tables useful.

Now compare that to the evolution of the visual studio feature set over the same period.

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