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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.

Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.

Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

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I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly used a tool up until 2020 that was originally created in Excel 97.

MATLAB was the runner up for our tools but the good part about Excel was that every PC had it whereas MATLAB wasn't and also needed network access for the license (or else your program/department had to buy a node license). Later, many people switched to python since not everyone loves MATLAB and it's more of a real software language (and it's free) than what's effectively a very expensive calculator.

> They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things.

We had this too. The apps were years out of date because they needed to be manually packaged for the internal store. The one person who was allowed to run the recorder to monitor the vendor installer (because that requires admin level to monitor other apps) to create the store install script has 1000 other package requests ahead of yours.

Excel on Mac does not have all the features. It does have most of them. It is also buggy.

Excel has kept many companies alive that ought to have sunk. It covers for incompetent CIOs and sclerotic management.

Blocking VBA (for security reasons) did wonders for process maturity because it forced funded implementation of programs. Now we have vibeslop we're going the other way.

Were you able to process truly large datasets? I worked at a very excel company once but we kept running into row limit issues when scaling workloads and eventually migrated almost everything away from it. What industry were you in at the time?

The same thing that works for databases also works for excel. You shard the data and run your analysis on the set of shards in excel. It's not elegant, but can solve many problems.

Aerospace. I was interacting with data sets on the order of hundreds of millions to low billions of rows. This particular company had legacy WinForms applications running against SQL Server. Excel can directly connect to the db to run complex, multi-step queries (IIRC it holds the connection open so you can do things in temp table). Hitting “Refresh” in Excel can trigger a lot of work. And then it can do a ton of processing locally. IIRC, there were no row limits on what excel could process locally (so long as the final result stayed under the sheet limit).

> Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.

You underestimate the task by multiple orders of magnitude. It would be a significant effort even to build it on libreoffice.

Within 5 years (maybe less) a frontier LLM will be capable of completely cloning Excel based on Microsoft's product documentation. And I mean starting from scratch, not using the messy Libreoffice code base.

> And I mean starting from scratch, not using the messy Libreoffice code base.

Given the libreoffice codebase is in its dataset, is that really from scratch?

I guess that means none of what a professional software engineer does is from scratch either, given that they're also trained on existing code.

Kind of hard to write code when you haven't seen a lot of it.

The actual codebase of libreoffice is in the dataset, and a model is designed to replicate plausibility from its dataset

The console in browsers is also very useful

Especially since it uses your cookies by default.

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