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Comment by jkaptur | Hacker News Reader

This view of spreadsheets is 100% accurate, beautiful, and inspiring. Spreadsheets have brought the power of computation to everyone.

... but I love to contrast this view with the behavior that Joel Spolsky observed: "... We visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call 'calculations.' Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. [snip] Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

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Fantastic observation. I once saw someone calculating the sum of a column (just a few numbers, ok) with a calculator!

There is a really famous screenshot in Korea of an old manager telling a new hire to NOT use excel functions and do it by hand (and shortly became a meme because of its absurdity). I’ve also heard similar things had happened in Japan.

That should be considered a firable offense on the part of the manager and borderline professional malpractice.

I need this screenshot.

Plot twist: the manager is concerned with floating point precision and the calculation require fractions to be carried throughout

Well if it's in excel those fractions have already been destroyed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

Hence demanding it to be done by hand from original integer entries.

Here you go. The messages are a hoot.

To paraphrase the last sentence:

"There are appropriate tools for each tasks. Just like you don't use the knife that you use to slaughter cows to slaughter chickens. And computers are the knife to slaughter cows in this case."

https://imgur.com/a/T4rrav4

Also why the hipster war on the table element was doomed to fail in html

What war are you referring to, and what hipsters? As someone who used tables extensively for layout at the time, there was never any war against it, just a desire for better layout via CSS which is what we have today (flexbox, grid).

Calling it a war against tables for actual tabular data is a bit over the top.

Oh, there definitely was a war.

There was also a desire for a better layour (flexbox, grid) but there was a war against tables for layout ("not semantic") even when the other option was a pile of hacks and kludges based on "float".

Table elements are pretty much completely absent from modern web dev though?

Layout yes. But not for tabular data, they're great for that.

Yeah only took about six or seven major revisions.

I remember an anecdote where some office worker after years of using Excel was very surprised to learn that the “tables program” could also do calculations.

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