Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, once you are past the free tier.. GSuite is close to the monthly cost of Office365, and Google sheets is not even close to Excel. You can basically program mini applications in Excel vs a basic spreadsheet app for medium sized spreadsheets that multiple people can edit in their browser with version tracking.

View on HN

I have Excel, and of course Sheets. I actually find Excel to be too full of features (same with Word). It's just too hard to figure out a simple thing like having the top row be column headings (yes, I do know how to do it, but it was not immediately apparent).

"Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.

Excel is the #1 programming language by a wide margin, and it evolved rather than was designed.

I remember when all reports were crystal reports which you don't see as much anymore? Excel is on the way out.

Exactly. Every release some PM or senior engineers wants to add some features, for no doubt good reasons, and it all gets shoehorned into the UI. Thus the rule I generally espouse, of

"Simple things should be simple. Complicated things should be possible."

turns into

"Everything is possible, but nothing is simple."

My summary view of much of Microsoft, and more of tech, is that, while a lot of the software is really good, too often the corresponging explanations and documentation are not.

There seems to be a theme that the user should learn to use the software via experimentation. To me, that too often results in too much clicking, and when finally I do see I take notes, i.e., document some of the software.

I keep pulling data into Google sheets because of this >=REGEXEXTRACT("My favorite number is 241, but my friend's is 17", "\d+")

I just wrote a quick regex vba function when I was last in a job on Office.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com