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Comment by countmora | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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