a favorite to share: You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky
Thank you!
I feel like I had barely encountered spreadsheets before my dad threw me in the deep end with SQL at age 13. I did not learn it well and now have a semester of database design as well, but I’d say I’m about as good at both? idk :( I’m pretty bad at both unless I compare myself to someone without a CS degree.
Maybe you need a career shift bud. As a designer you could absolutely use those softwares!
Excel is a powerful tool. I was solving system of differential equations with Newton method in it. Sometimes it is easier than in Matlab (or Mathematica) if all you have is good understanding of how step-wise equations should look like, but not the differential equations themselves. Those steps may include if statements, for example.
Had to do a similar project and it took me three full days of back and forth with another software before I found out EXCEL rounds small numbers in very weird ways.
Also, in EXCEL functions/formulas and data/values are wildly mixed.
(Not mentioning a plethora of other mildly infuriating quirks here)
What does it do that LibreOffice Calc doesn’t do?
Smooth scrolling.
Kind of serious, the lack of smooth scrolling makes Calc really horrible to use on a touchpad or with large/differing sized cells (formatted sheets with headers and such)
Embed objects and query spaces from other Microsoft products, mainly.
It’s a circular argument that all of the corporate world is too heavily invested in to change.
Almost nothing, considering Calc is a clone. I don’t think people are excluding LibreOffice from the list of smooth brain apps.
Not lagging horribly with big tables after calculating a simple formula? That’s the only thing i can think of. Everything else is just very similar
Oh but excel does lag heavily with any table over a couple megabytes, of course that’s only on my computer
You probably have apple stuff or Intel or windows /s
Does libre office do pivot charts?
Call me crazy, but the admittance matrix hw (Gaussian, G-S, Newton, N-R, etc.) I did last semester was much more intuitive for me on MATLAB than on Excel… but I’m gonna get screwed for that because a vast majority of companies would never bother to pay for MATLAB (+ Toolboxes) licenses.
There is always Octave.
And I am not claiming that Excel is better than Matlab. There are lots of tasks where Matlab is better, or where it is not even possible to use Excel with any efficiency. And yet, Excel IS a powerful tool for scientists and engineers. Not just for accountants.We have a single licence for matlab installed on an old laptop in the lab. I find it easier to program in Excel than try to reserve the laptop and go to the office (sometimes you reserve it and after arriving you find out that the last guy never returned it so you spend extra time trying to find where it is or who has it)
Matlab excels at dgls, Excel does math not. Newton method isn’t it
I’m in university and I use both…
TBF if you’re professionally using MATLAB you’re like, sending people to space or modeling atmospheres. Which I guess some of you might do haha.
I’ve used it to simulate things for mechanisms and motors etc for mechanical engineering
Me: oracle, oracle and more oracle
Damnit, who put a maze with no exits in this cage?
Garbage software is one of the primary reasons I left my last job despite high pay. It just got too friggin annoying to use. They’d roll out a ‘hotfix’ to fix something they had broken 3 months earlier and they’d break 2 new things which previously had been working fine for years. The support was so bad I just bought a magic eight ball for our office and we’d ask it our support questions.
Yardi, I’m looking at you.
Damn, I really dodged a bullet there… by them rejecting my application.
Being a SOLIDWORKS customer is exactly the same as being a rat in a cage. They are the most aggressively evil I’ve ever experienced. Adobe etc not even close
What are some examples? What makes them so much more evil than Adobe?
Yeah I wanted to comment on this too. It’s a win for ms against dassault every time
Not that bad when you sail the high seas
I’ve known people that had authorities show up from that btw
I have to use solidworks at work. God, do I miss Creo.
I used Creo for about 5 years at a previous job but I never knew the cost. How does it compare?
Creo has a bit of a steeper learning curve to be sure, and is more expensive.
But it also is, in my experience, much more robust and has a lot more capability on the advanced side of modeling. Solidworks requires more workarounds in order to accomplish what you’re trying to do, vs Creo with probably a dedicated tool for that specific task.
Compare in cost
Man I guess I’m spoiled. We get access to the top row except SolidWorks because we license an alternative. We use the entire MS suite too though but as a supplement. I don’t use excel hardly at all because JMP is superior in every single way, except for dashboards where we use PowerBI.
MATLAB being jacked but still a little off feels right to me lol.
Yep, that hole on the head is perfectly representative.
I want to love Julia so much, but it’s always something. The funky handling of scope in the REPL was the latest off-putting thing for me, but maybe I should give it a try again…
If you don’t like MATLAB your probably not the correct audience. It’s for people needing to do data analysis, simulation or control and have a lot of money to pay for the libraries. The things software developers hate about it tend to be what makes it better for statistics and modelling. Math works even suggest it isn’t appropriate for making software as the sell simulink coder that turns simulink models into c++ code.
I am 100% the target audience, have worked on multiple teams that did their 6DOF models in Matlab for GNC and orbital dynamics stuff.
I still think simulink is absolutely terrible. It makes certain things a lot easier to implement but the Git implementation is very nearly useless.
I can see Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as stupid.
But Excel is perfect! You can’t say You have mastered it.
Even if You have written a book about Excel, it transcends You.
Excel does too many things. A better price of software would do less.
I can’t tell if this is ironic or not, because it genuinely feels like Microsoft believes this when you look at the absolute disgrace “New” Outlook is.
For Microsoft, “Modern, sleek, streamlined” are just marketing terms for “We got lazy, made a less useful wed-based product, and you’ll have to accept it, at the same price, while we save money on development.”
The reduced feature set in the web app is either development hasn’t reached parity, or they want it to be just enough to compete with Google sheets but keep people using the windows app.
A better price of software would be several different tools. But Microsoft want to keep the features set and backwards compatibility and the users don’t want big changes so the messy mishmash it what results.
Excel is used as a app builder, a database, plotting tool, table formatting, dashboard, visual basic environment, simulation environment there’s probably many more uses. I think it was supposed to be a calculator and accountancy book combination.
If anyone knew excel (or spreadsheets in general) would become what they did they would design it completely differently. A database that links to different pieces of software would be much better. That can’t exist now, because the markets consumed by excel.
Outlook really has a lot of obscure features that not many people used. I think it’s good for them to cull these less used features and later re-add them rewritten in a more supportable manner.
I also really appreciate the emoji-reactions because I don’t have to type out a response expressing that I have read and acknowledge an email, I can just give it a thumbs up and move on, and they don’t receive a whole email to read, they just see that it got a thumbs up and can move on too
Those are different categories of problems.
Excel really does too much. Biologists literally renamed a genom because Excel kept turning it into a date. If any other database did that, the vendor would hear a friendly but stern “get fucked”.
They’re using a spreadsheet and getting burned when it acts like a spreadsheet. It’s like complaining that a screwdriver did a bad job hammering nails.
Yeah, that’s my point. Excel is almost never the right tool, but since it’s doing so much, it can be used for almost anything, just in a very shitty manner. And in reality, it is used for almost anything.
I thought I knew everything about Excel, but just last week I learned that it now has TypeScript integration for macros. I nearly wept tears of joy. Finally I can leave behind VBA.
Saying you mastered excel is like saying you mastered meth
I really like Google sheets, QUERY() is so useful.
Unpopular opinion time: but give me a csv and a python script any day over excel.
I can’t count the hours I spend cleaning up and debugging xlsx files from customers that were completely unusable due to excels automatic data type feature.
You can turn that off now.
What do Excel and Incels have in common?
They assume everything is a date.
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Not sure if you’re joking, but that’s a thing. You can just insert python scripts into a cell and have their return values be the cell value.
Python in Excel requires Internet access because calculations run on remote servers in the Microsoft Cloud. The calculations are not run by your local Excel application.
… so?
That sounds like pychart to me!
Excel is, almost certainly, the single most important and influential piece of software in almost every business.
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
i heard you like a little database in your excel
.
we have an excel spreadsheet at my workplace that takes a solid 2 minutes to open and even longer to close and accesses a number of other spreadsheets with read/write access in the background. it’s an absolute monster.
(it’s essentially a database that keeps track of the calibration dates for our testing equipment)
There are numerous reports and databases we work with from other platforms, and for nearly all of them, I just end up feeding it to Excel so I can manage it the way I like. So many of those platforms just have absolute dog shit UIs or refuse to present data in a configurable way, or straight up hide certain things for no reason.
Part of my Monday morning routine is actually exporting a CSV for a couple things that can’t be connected directly to excel, hitting Get Data, and letting my custom workbooks do their thing. Watching it all update and present itself in exactly the way I want to see it is so god damn satisfying.
there are definitely reasons to use excel but in my case there is a defined and expected workflow and using excel just makes it unnecessarily slow and error-prone. at this point, the worksheet breaks at least once every 3 months and i’m the one who gets to fix it because i read myself into the worksheet’s script and the guy who originally created it doesn’t work for us anymore.
the code is (thankfully) well enough commented that additional documentation is not necessary to understand it, so reading yourself into it is thankfully easy enough as long as you know VBA.
Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.
the only reason that the spreadsheet exist is because of macros (pretty sure the table has over 10.000 lines of VBA, with more in the tables it accesses) but my bosses are thankfully investigating alternatives for a migration of the functions that that table provides.
I sadly am only a trainee at the company, so i don’t get too much input beyond fixing whatever breaks with it every so often while it’s still in use, but yeah.“Only a trainee…”
Sounds like you’re the only one keeping that thing running. Don’t sell yourself short!
my boss does appreciate what i’m doing but i just don’t have a decision power that someone working in IT would have (i work in the physics/chemistry lab). thanks though, i appreciate the sentiment :)
Until it has an odbc connection to a sql server or access db it’s still low level wizardry.
you can access sql from excel? i am now officially horrified.
You can issue queries, import and transform the data on demand.
Next time you open excel go to the data tab and look at all the things it can do.
It really shouldn’t do those things, but it can.
Since the 90s for a lot of it…
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
It’s turning complete, so it’s should be able to do anything. Power point is also turning complete, but not practical. Excel is practical enough to get started then moving on to something better gets hard because people depend on those excel sheets.
I’m not sure, if it’s autocorrect or misinformation, but it’s “Turing complete”, after Alan Turing.
It’s as in once you try it there is no turning back
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
I once saw a post on reddit where a bored guy in his office stream movies from his home PC to Excel.
As much as I despise Microsoft and 365, Excel is like the one thing I genuinely think they deserve an incredible amount of credit for. It’s one of the most invaluable, well supported tools around.
Shame you can’t just buy it.
You can. It’s expensive, but perpetual licences for Office still exist. The Home edition is €150, the professional edition costs €580.
I mean Excel specifically, not the whole suite. I don’t need PowerPoint or a word processor, I’d rather it not be included in the price at all.
Also, they’ve made OneDrive a requirement for auto-saving on 365, not sure if that’s the case for the perpetual licenses, but if so, that’s a deal breaker for me. There will never be a Microsoft account associated with my Windows machine, period.
The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can’t unsee it.
Nope I’m not seeing it personally.
why did you have to say this
Thanks! I can’t unsee it but I like it more now 😆
What is stopping you from proposing better software?
Never worked in a corporate environment?
Sure I have.
If you spin it by saying it would improve productivity, they’ll listen and pretend it was their idea all along.
Or (way more likely) they’ll just not listen or find excuses. That’s how large corporations work. Do you really think, you’d be the first one to propose that maybe excel isn’t the best tool for the job?
Management.
Mainly corporate momentum.
The decision to shift out of the microsoft is too costly at this point for even medium sized businesses to consider.
Nothing. It’s the listening bit from the receiving end that’s the problem.
despite all my rage i’m still just a rat in a cave
I dynamic for crm, SQL
