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Comment by filcuk | Hacker News Reader

Why would spreadsheet software try to differ in formula names? You want users to be able to switch to your platform with little friction.

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It used to be the other way around, with Excel leading the way.

This is one of those fringe features that 1% of users are clamoring for and 99% of users should never ever use. I’m not surprised it was never at the top of the Excel team’s TODO list.

Yeah the problem is that those 1% of users are probably writing the most critical spreadsheets, and when companies using GSuite think about moving to Office365 the more pain it is to migrate spreadsheets the worse for Microsoft.

So why are only 2/3 of the formulas named the same? Excel's new REGEXTEST [1] is REGEXMATCH in Sheets [2]

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/regextest-functio...

[2]https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098292?hl=en

I've been using Sheets's regex functions for over a year, they're really helpful for basic data transformation.

Excel also got a "split" function much later than Sheets did.

I was excited to read on the Sheets blog that Sheets finally will have a table functionality, which Excel has always had: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/05/tables-in-go...

Or Excel mimicking the broken calendar of Lotus 123.

And it was an excellent decision, see rationale: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii...

TBH, they should have dumped during switch to OOXML, that was a wasted opportunity. On the other hand, that's hard sell to business.

Good ideas should have a provisional naming period where a standardize name can be agreed on. Anything else leads to fragmentation and lock in due to domain specific terminology.

Well, excel translates the formula names... (One of the many reasons I switched over to using windows in english, rather than german)

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