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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Excel is that it tries to do almost everything in one software tool: front-end (editing, presentation), analysis, semantic modeling, data storage/database.

Almost all reasonable engineers see that there is something wrong with such an approach. But almost all everyday computer users think that this is the way computing has to be.

Sometimes I wonder why even I voluntarily open it for certain tasks - anyway, despite all the criticism, Excel has reached the Lindy[1] threshold for me and is here to stay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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The biggest problem is that the development cost for a solution 'a bit better' than a complex Excel spreadsheet is often stratospheric.

Many tech start-ups are 'replace this thing people do in Excel with a purpose built tool'

Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves. E.g. spreadsheets can have mistakes very quickly when people treat them as databases and start copying columns between spreadsheets assuming that the primary keys (e.g. in one column) are identical while they happily add rows and move rows around.

To be fair, there are no good, accessible database tools around for your average non programmer user.

Access tried to be this a decade ago, until MS started to let it die. So now, your only option is basically Excel. There's a reason it's the main thing people gravitate into.

> Access tried to be this a decade ago

three decades ago :)

Claris FileMaker was that tool. Easy to understand and provided clear separation between data and the rest. Bundled with Mac OS so everyone used it. It is now an expensive enclave.

For really simple databases, I've had limited success getting people to use a UI in front of SQLite:

https://sqlitebrowser.org/

My problem with excel is that I love it too much, even though I know that I maybe shouldn’t. It hits some perfect point between structured and unstructured data that is conducive to just filling in cells and seeing what happens.

I say “I shouldn’t” because the off-ramp from a working solution to a proper productized code-based approach can be very painful.

Spreadsheet are wonderful and powerful, Excel is ass. Love the concept, hate the implementation.

Unfortunately, it’s also industry standard ass.

Excel can also send mail through VBA scripts, thus satisfying Zawinski's Law[1].

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Except that it's proprietary and will eventually be un-maintained and stop working. But spreadsheets, in general, fall under the Lindy effect and open source software will continue it for centuries to come.

Although excel spreadsheets have had more longevity than lots of other formats…

You might have had a point in the days of .xls, but Excel by default uses .xlsx now which is just XML packaged inside a .zip archive if I recall.

And yes, Excel still fully supports .xls too.

I fear whatever format LibreOffice uses will die first, case in point I don't even remember what it's called even though I should as a computer nerd.

MS-OOXML is barely an open format. Have you tried implementing it? ECMA-376 part 1 is over 5000 pages, and there are four parts to it! (Part 1 contains an extra bit about SpreadsheetML, but by that point we were two zips deep. I turned back ere I got lost.)

The OpenDocument formats, meanwhile, are older, simpler and better than their MS-OOXML equivalents. (The ODF spec is 1041 pages altogether – 215 pages of that are the spreadsheet formula language.) LibreOffice's implementation is a little janky, sure, but I can edit OpenDocument files by hand. Try doing that to a MS-OOXML file. (Good luck.)

Its easier for me to imagine a world in which AI makes spreadsheets invisible to the modern person than it is to imagine a world in which Excel isn't the de facto spreadsheet.

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