You’re entitled to your opinion but I would say Excel is one of the best, if not THE best spreadsheet application ever produced. It’s one thing that Microsoft actually got mostly right and one of the only reasons I still pay for an Office 365 subscription.
If you’re just creating simple spreadsheets, there’s plenty of other options out there.
But, if you’re a power user doing a lot of complex data analytics, Excel is still the king.
My main gripe is that I still have to use VBA for a lot of stuff behind the scenes. Yuck.
If you’re going to do complex data analysis, isn’t it a pain to use ANY spreadsheet software, no matter how good? I do mine as a Jupyter notebook. The spreadsheet is just for looking at the numbers, maybe sorting some things.
I’m not a power user, so I’m often frustrated by Excel trying to do things I don’t want it to and by its abundance of features that I’ll never use.
And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.
I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.
And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.
I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.
Capability is a double edged sword. Any tool that is capable of doing something is going to be used by someone to do that thing, regardless of whether it should be. Excel gets abused and used for things that it shouldn’t be frequently in corporate environments because of its capabilities. I can understand being frustrated by that.
I use Excel for reporting and analytics because it makes manipulating and visualizing data very easy. Especially if you know what you’re doing. No need to write a UI or worry about portability between workstations, etc. At the end of the day it’s a tool. A very capable one. Like any tool, it’s not the right one for every job.
Dude just ask any advanced LLM how to do what you need to do in excel. The info is out there and they’ve digested in a million times.
Or, don’t. And let your inabilities to do things consume you emotionally. Idgaf.
Edit: Lemmy’s hate-boner for AI is dumbfounding. I get that it’s a hype train and shoved down your throats but if you ignore that it will get you results way faster than googling ever did you’re basically “old”. And I say this pushing 40.
Downvote away, but I challenge anyone to give me a db and a desired subset that I can’t produce by simply querying a good LLM.
Lol. Don’t bother asking Chat GPT for help. You will get so many completely wrong answers. At least the answers will be formatted nicely. Complete bullshit. But easily readable bullshit.
But, if you’re a power user doing a lot of complex data analytics, Excel is still the king.
Only if you refuse to learn SQL and do everything in a fraction of the time with way more functionality.
That works when you have access to a SQL database instead of a bunch of massive CSV files.
Not saying there’s any reason to switch, but I believe you can load CSV’s into sqlite.
Datasette would be something that I would try for CSV’s as well, that seems like an interesting piece of technology I haven’t had reason to use yet.
Finally there’s always Jupiter Notebook and any respectable DataFrame-solution.
Not to knock spreadsheet-solutions too much - I certainly see their value and use them frequently - but if I had to do something that warranted writing VBA, I’d probably reach for a tool I could combine with some form of VCS like Git at least.
Curious what you get out of value from the subscription that you wouldn’t get from a slightly older non subscription version of excel?
Has XLOOKUP made its way into the non-subscription version? I’ve found it a lot easier and flexible to use than VLOOKUP.
Excel is probably the most powerful application ever created. Especially now that it can be connected to SQL and python natively
This whole thread could have been an access database
Excel can be it’s own kind of awful, but using it with other people makes me want to jump off a bridge onto a rusty bed of nails. They move cells around, change the labels on columns, color cells with no benefit, change half a sheet to comic sans, they fucking send you back “bullshit-v1.0-good.xlsx” then ”garbage name v0.3_gooder.csv”. Jesus fuck. The shitty thing has built in version control you ignorant fuck!
This thread surprises me. Excel is fine, but I’ve seen people do so many silly things with it that it makes me dread having to use it. It’s like they treat every cell as its own special little canvas… Oh, you wanna randomly change the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd-Mmm-yy mid-column? With Excel, anything is possible.
Maybe I just don’t work well with others.
Spreadsheets generally are a useful tool, no matter if it’s Excel, LibreOffice, or Google Sheets. There’s a sweet spot where the data isn’t so complicated that it justifies a full database and programming language.
There is a point, though, where you need to admit the dataset and your manipulations of it have gotten too big. If you were wondering who was excited about the Excel row limit going from 16k to 1M back in 2010, the answer is professors of Economics. This should tell you a lot.
