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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Excel is probably the most powerful application ever created. Especially now that it can be connected to SQL and python natively
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.
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.
ohhh nonono You hate it because you either don’t know how to use/don’t use it enough, or you just don’t like your job. Excel is amazing, I could cry talking about it hahaha I had to work with google sheets once and almost had a heart attack, if I had no excel my job would be unberable
I’d agree with this. When I first started using Excel in school and university, I’d follow the instructions and not really know why I was doing what I was doing.
But then, having to work with Excel at work and make it do new shit, the penny dropped in my head and I understood how spreadsheets worked.
I use spreadsheets for heaps of things now, even if I don’t need to use formulas. Excel has some weird idiosyncrasies but it’s a good product overall. It’s not as bad as Word, which most people use incorrectly.
I thought I hated excel, but then I tried Google sheets. Somehow it’s even worse.
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.
God is Excel good, and I feel like I’ve barely touched the VBA part making buttons for my colleagues to get to certain parts of the Excel instantly. It runs well, and gets so much information out in a unique way, Speinkled with functions that run well . And it runs quite fast for something that can do so much
I’d say it’s the task you do on it you dislike, not the program
