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Comment by lotsofcows | Hacker News Reader

"Excel is to CSV" You mean a huge bloated mess that takes forever to load and encourages people to turn my beautiful data into some proprietary bollocks because they're to lazy to learn awk? Sorry, that was quite a long sentence, let me see if I can turn it into a useless but pretty chart...

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Pretty wrong. It's a huge bloated mess that takes forever to lead and can be used to store data and code seamlessly in cells to make a single document holding both presentation and logic. Excel suffers from being a microsoft product, not from a being a bad idea. Spreadsheets are a fucking great idea. Visual programming, code as data, etc etc.

I disagree. It isn't reproducible AND people make mistakes and then present papers and other outcomes that later is shown to be false.

Spreadsheets are treated as Swiss Army Knifes. People believe all they need to do anything is Word and Excel.

What could the same people who are using excel have used instead that would have prevented them from making an error in their steps of calculation?

When dealing with non tech-savy people on data (reports), Excel is perfectly fine (especially pivot tables, conditional formatting, etc...).

Anything else is obviously a mess - and people can use gDocs or OpenOffice for that as well.

What's wrong?

Spreadsheets are great for all sorts of reasons. However, they are not some magical tool that makes csv files usable.

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