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Comment by Nate75Sanders | Hacker News Reader

"Likewise, the mandatory installation of Excel becomes super easy with the deal from Microsoft."

Huh? mandatory installation of Excel?

Not just for YC folks - Microsoft has their BizSpark program, which is pretty awesome for startups - it gives you access to basically every Microsoft product ever made for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

I can confirm that this program is great! Our startup leveraged it as much as we could. It also includes other free things such as Windows Azure hours.

We are using BizSpark for two months now and it helps a lot, but it's not for free you have to pay 100$ after three years.

Oh, you end up needing Excel if you're doing a startup. Cap tables, etc.

Don't you mean a spreadsheet?

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not trying to troll or be difficult. It's a grid with some cells that does some math. I just figured _anything_ would work.

You typically have to start worrying about using specifically MS products when compatibility becomes an issue. This is usually more true for Word than Excel, though, by a long shot (I have deep, painful experience with this)

Excel is basically the best product Microsoft has ever made. Google Docs doesn't work for much beyond the basics, and Open Office is still inferior when doing anything complicated.

You can do cap tables and pretty advanced calculations with both Google Docs and Open Office. More than enough to do your accounting with, although I'd use an accounting app for that rather than a spreadsheet anyway.

I'm sure you can get away with not using Excel if you have some sort of religious prohibition against it, but if you're a pragmatic person who uses the right tool for the job, is it really that bad that it turns out to be Excel? I mean, it runs on a Mac.

I take "the right tool for the job" to be the one with the least number of features greater than what I need. Don't use Word where a text editor will do; don't use a database if you just need a K-V store; don't launch Photoshop if you're just going to crop something; etc. If I were to pick between "something that does [what you need]" and "something that does [what you need, plus a ton of other stuff]", the former would be much preferable—mainly because it gets out of the way and doesn't confuse the UI with all the possibilities I'm not doing. This is half of what companies pay to build CRUD apps for: to limit the ways in which people can interact with a database to only those that are useful for the company, so they can be more productive.

Yeah, I've never actually ended up needing to use Excel either. Which is good, because I'm cheap, and Excel is not.

If you create enough spreadsheets to warrant spending $200 on Office, then use Excel. For me Google Docs is good enough and getting better. I just don't use Word/Excel enough to justify the price.

> I mean, it runs on a Mac.

I'm on kubuntu, I could run it in a VM though it's much simpler to open google docs in a new chrome tab and more than enough for my needs, so why bother? It's not the right tool for the job if google docs gets the job done for me with much less hassle.

> I mean, it runs on a Mac.

I'm not an MBA number-cruncher type, but all the product managers at my (otherwise Mac-heavy) company insist on running Excel through a VM or a Boot Camp installation because the Mac version of Excel doesn't offer a lot of the functionality that they rely on in the Windows version.

The first time you get a spreadsheet that you can't open from a lawyer or accountant or send a spreadsheet that "doesn't work", it'll be worth it to have used Excel.

There's more than enough hassles involved with running a company - doing compatibility work for office software shouldn't be one of them - just use what is the industry standard.

How is compatibility a problem? Google Docs, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice can all save their spreadsheets in .xls format.

Also, if I have to worry about this kind of thing, it means I'm working with people who voluntarily use NT. Nothing good can come from that. ;)

I haven't tried Excel compatibility, but everyone is able to read .doc files, and yet compatibility with Word fails for almost every non-trivial feature (especially layout things). So, I'd be wary of that.

So it is safe to assume your'e not the rms?

The thing is, it's not just a grid with some cells that does some math. Excel is incredibly powerful and if you integrate it with the full Office Suite + Sharepoint, you can really start to do some amazing things. I'm constantly blown away with the tips and tricks I learn from people at work.

I recognize that most startups aren't going for the full MS package (esp. Sharepoint), but I look at these tools as a suite that grows in power as you need it. With the Ribbon, you get great discoverability of these advanced functions as your needs arise.

There may be some obscure things Excel can do that Calc can't, but I've never had to do anything on a spreadsheet Calc can't do yet. Besides, Calc can use Python macros.

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