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 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)
I am horrified and amazed
Mostly horrified.
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.
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.
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…
Excel can do anything, including so many things it shouldn’t.
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.
What do Excel and Incels have in common?
They assume everything is a date.
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.
Is it just me or is office 365 just worse and more impractical than the old office suites?
I think it’s mostly because they keep trying to push other services down your throat. For example, opening a link in Outlook opens it in Edge, even when your default browser is something else. I can’t use Edge for that link, I’m not signed into stuff there. So now, because of retarded decisions like that, Outlook actually is missing basic features that Hotmail in the 90s had.
because of retarded decisions like that
You know you could have just used shitty instead of using a slur, which would have the same emphasis without the baggage of the other word.
Seriously, wtf is wrong with this website? I saw this again just this week. Next I know these a holes will be going around calling things gay. "WeLl AlShUlLy ThE dEfInItIoN Of GaY iS HaPpY sO… "
If you really felt it necessary to offer a synonym, you could have said “backward” … because that’s what the word actually means
Shitty has a different meaning. Above commenter meant to say the person making the decision was differently abled with regards to their cognitive capabilities. The other is excrement.
because of retarded decisions like that
“Retarded”, really? JFC what is this, 2001?
The definition of “retardation” is as follows:
- The act or process of delaying or impeding.
- The condition of being delayed or impeded.
- The extent to which something is held back or delayed.
Considering that the features being complained about impede the user, calling those features “retarded” is an adequate description.
It is also in-fitting with the definition of lacking of intellectual development; as mentioned, other programs do not feature such impediments, and in the case of Office 365, may actually be a regression of features.
Retard has transitioned from an impartial term to one that is negatively loaded. For this reason, the term is now widely considered as degrading even when used in its original context.[10]
Much like today’s socially acceptable terms idiot and moron, which are also defined as some sort of mental disability, when the term retard is being used in its pejorative form, it is usually not being directed at people with mental disabilities. Instead, people use the term when teasing their friends or as a general insult.[11]
Do you think people who have the condition of mental retardation experience bigotry in our society? Are you not aware “retarded” has been used extensively as a slur? And are you so inconvenienced you can’t come up with a single less-problematic synonym?
Yes I am aware that retard has been used as a slur… Against those that don’t have any reason to behave like a retard.
I do not see any issue.
Caveat emptor ESL here but, while that’s true, wouldn’t under those terms “retarding” be a much better fit?
Yes the decision isn’t retarded, it was made fast enough. The consequence is retarding though.
FYI you can change that in settings to launch the systems default browser. Extra steps yes, but the option is there.
In what way? I use it a lot and feel like it’s still on par with the older versions. It’s got some annoying “Microsoft-y” things typical to them from the last 10 years or so but I think the core functionality is still intact.
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
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
Python and Excel should be buff wojaks with brainlette heads, they get the work done but ughhhhh to using them.
The Matlab logo looks like a boner under a sheet and now I can’t unsee it.
Nope I’m not seeing it personally.
I will always appreciate a true Excel power user. I’ve seen some black magic shit.
This is one of my favorites to share. It’s a 3D engine with raytracing with no VBA scripting - all of the calculations are done internally with spreadsheet math.
Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.
When you know Excel really well, it’s like Legos for data. If you’ve got the imagination, intuition, and patience, you can make some incredible stuff.
And between knowing Excel like you’ve described and knowing only the basics exists an uncanny valley of being able to create some truly revolting abominations. Additionally when all you know is Excel, every problem becomes a spreadsheet, for better or for worse (usually the latter).
The Ribbon interface used on office products isn’t there because it’s good UX. It exists because there’s a software patent on it.
If office didn’t use a patented UI, someone could make office software that replicated the UI of MS Office which would allow companies to switch to other products without having to retrain staff.
Microsoft was enshittifying their software long before anyone else.
If it wasn’t good UX why would other companies want to replicate it? Also, design parents don’t last all that long, Ribbon has been around since MS Office 2007, which means it would be at the longest recently out of patent coverage.
No matter where you stand on your views of the ribbon, Microsoft introduced it in what, 2007? The patent is gonna expire soon.
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
You’re probably at the wrong job then.
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Depends on the field
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.
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.
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?
Does libre office do pivot charts?
There’s a middleground. Power Automate. The website crashes Firefox.
I hate power automate so so so much
Why?
I guess I’m so used to thinking in code, and power automate seems hell-bent on being aimed at More business oriented folks. I find it extremely unintuitive, and downright hostile in terms of actually getting something done that I know how to do, but I’m not allowed to.
100%. Power automate doing anything other than the templates they have is almost always harder than just writing python
I think you nailed it. Why as a developer admin in a corporation one would use powerautomate? At my last job I had to, as I dodnt have machines to physically run some tools and automation my team needed, or access to higher level stuff but that sounds to me like an Oracle sysadmin complaining that Access is a pain in the ass, just don’t use it…
The licensing process is very confusing for starters.
Hardly an end user problem though? I’m used to get it through corporate deals at work and in an organisation I volunteer for. Slightly different setups and access to tools but not through end of the world
That bottom row of wojaks are ableist as hell, I really wish people would stop using them.
Just enable Accessibility settings under Options.
