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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.

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> Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it.

If you've found any Excel guru that don't spend most of their time in VBA, you have a really unusual experience.

Huge numbers of accountants and lawyers use excel heavily knowing only the built in formula language. They will have a few "gurus" sprinkled around who can write macros but this is used sparingly because the macros are a black box and make it harder to audit the financial models.

I've worked in finance for 20 years and this is the complete opposite of my experience. Excel is ubiquitous and drives all sorts of business processes in various departments. I've seen people I would consider Excel gurus, in that they are able to use Excel much more productively than normal users, but I've almost never seen anyone use VBA.

Excel is a programming system with pure functions, imperative code (VBA/Python recently), database (cell grid, sheets etc.) and visualization tools.

So, not really "no-code".

That’s technically correct but it’s also wrong.

No-code in excel is that most functions are implemented for user and user doesn’t have to know anything about software development to create what he needs and doesn’t need software developer to do stuff for him.

Excel is hardly "no-code". Any heavy use of Excel I've seen uses formulas, which are straight-up code.

But any heavy use of "no-code" apps also ends up looking this way, with "straight-up code" behind many of the wysiwyg boxes.

Right, but "no-code" implies something: programming without code. Excel is not that in any fashion. It's either programming with code or an ordinary spreadsheet application without code. You'd really have to stretch your definitions to consider it "no-code" in a way that wouldn't apply to pretty much any office application.

I would disagree. Every formula you enter into a cell is "code". Moreover, more complex worksheets require VBA.

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