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Comment by stonecharioteer | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people explored Excel. Not just spreadsheets. But MS Excel. It is the best piece of software that came out of MSFT.

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It is the best, but also the very very worst in so many ways.

There are all sorts of data that are nearly impossible to get into Excel because of the ways that it tries to turn everything into a date. There has been so much silent data corruption because of random misfeatures that were added decades ago and now they will never back out of the system. The string OCT4 amongst a column of alphanumeric identifiers will get changed into a date, silently, on import, and it's nigh on impossible to find out how to import without that silent conversion. It's better to write your own Python code to get data into Excel than to use its built in foot guns.

That can be turned off (easily Googled), or as mentioned, doesn’t affect proper import using Power Query. Also, if you control the data format and know Excel is the intended target, you can just output your CSV so Excel won’t do that (put =“ and “ around text columns).

For any spreadsheet which are updated by refreshing source data such as CSV output from other systems, PowerQuery is what should be used and is very effective.

What are the web search terms you use to find to turn this off? Most people have not been able to figure this out, with the help of the web or in the application itself.

The typical windows user is not going to be accomplish a successful import, except maybe by whatever the heck PowerQuery is.

If you import with PowerQuery you can explicitly specify the data type for each column.

I just tried an import of a CSV file containing "OCT4" in a line by itself, and Excel asked me if I wanted to convert it. I clicked "No", and it imported without conversion.

I wish more people stop hating on Excel. It's an incredible tool with cool stuff baked in (Python support, PowerQuery, etc.). Just because some people misuse it as database or it doesn't scale well beyond a couple of 10k rows does not make it a bad product. For 90% of daily office tasks it's just fine.

> Just because some people misuse it as database or it doesn't scale well beyond a couple of 10k rows does not make it a bad product.

It's not just that making it a bad product. Those are minor annoyances when compared with it trying to keep your data hostage in opaque formats[1] and exfiltrating your data to the cloud[2].

[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...

[2] https://superuser.com/questions/1903431/how-to-stop-excel-36...

The recent releases with new functions are great, there's a lot that can be done in a format that both pervasive and familiar. And Power Query is indeed a useful addition.

Is Python is still a metered cloud runtime?

I don't think it's as bad as people make it, and certainly we can't blame non-technical users if they like it, for many tasks it's the only tool that's simultaneously usable by normal people and powerful enough.

It suffers from trying to do too many things at once, though. Excel 3 is enough for those use cases without being a complete nightmare for everyone else. Electronic spreadsheets as a concepts are genius, it's the implementation I hate.

Too many at once? Apparently, you can insert Python code into Excel now, which then gets executed into whatever Azure's equivalent of lambda is. I was recently introduced to someone at work who vibe coded an entire Python application in it and burned through their teams worth of cloud credits.

When Python in Excel was announced I was initially pretty excited until I found out that it executes in Azure.

WHY wouldn't Microsoft just run it in the local interpreter on the machine?

> WHY wouldn't Microsoft just run it in the local interpreter on the machine?

Probably to tighten vendor lock-in.

Excel is fantastic. I love it.

But using a spreadsheet to store data is completely reasonable. We delude ourselves as technically experienced people when we imply otherwise. When Excel fucks up data (perhaps the most unforgivable sin in all of software) with unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting (i.e. "trying to be clever"), it's absolutely out of touch to point the finger at the end user.

> unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting

Agree. Soooo many leading zeroes have been striped from ZIP codes.

Equally as bad is no visual indicator to distinguish formula cell from static cells. Easy to silently overwrite formulas with a careless paste.

I love Excel. In some ways it is similar to Jupyter Notebooks: great for exploration, horrible for using in production.

It can be great in production, like any tool it depends on the nature of the task.

Tangential: Timeless post I go back and read through periodically: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

I'm a BI engineer, and I always convince people to use something else. But when I need to calculate my finances, and does not fit into Obsidian, I find myself using Excel again too :D Great product. Maybe not so much if you need to align on financial numbers - as everyone has their own truth :)

MS Excel is good because it has Lisp inside. Does Pivot thing contain Lisp?

Why do you think Excel has LISP inside? What would that have to do with Pivot Tables?

1. The datatype.

2. Idk, just asking.

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