I think that conclusion is spot on. Excel is sort of the "this is why we can't change" tent pole of the ms stack and users actually like it. Companies will learn windows administration because excel is an accept no substitutes market leader

Messing with the formula (ha) could be a real cliff edge

Do they need Excel or just a spreadsheet.

Most of the users I have with Excel can just as easily use Libre / GSheets. I suppose custom programs are more common in finance?

The reg had a good article about airbus, for example. Their finance department actually has explored new frontiers of excel and they're unable to switch at this point. It's holding up the entire project to drop Microsoft

if you don't consider things like auto formatting data it reads in, forgetting the format of columns in a filtered table read from an external source, or the whole thing being abused for things it was not meant for. Plus the shitty graphs, the inability to do statistics with it (despite people trying and messing things up), the way it translates inbuilt functions so switching between system languages messes with you (thank you very much, I do work in different environments), the bloody stupid way in which frames / cell borders are coloured, its complete inability to read in correct CSV files, the import functions they removed, and the AI they will inevitably add. But yeah, it's a great product. /s To be fair: you can do a lot with it. It's just that so many things are more difficult than they should be. At least the bug that it would only use the first 63 cells for some stats functions no longer exists (I hope, that was a couple of decades ago).

I wish I had a job where it was explicitly forbidden and people were forced to store and analyse data in a real database...

Changing the language changes CSV separators and CSV number formatting, spreadsheet formulas change depending on the language, dates and times are a nightmare...

I wish I had a job where it was explicitly forbidden and people were forced to store and analyse data in a real database...

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, like many others, all we get are lousy (customizable) reports on lousy data in a lousy tool with very limited connection to financial data. Hence, I'm really glad that I can fiddle around with Excel and its native array functions.

... and hate Microsoft. That's why I use Libre Calc.

Then you need a spreadsheet and nothing else will substitute. That's why Visicalc was such an instant killer app and why people bought an Apple to run it.

Excel, as crappy as it is, is about it for options, unless you're lucky enough to be able to use Libreoffice. Visicalc, SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 etc have all fallen by the wayside

Google Sheets sucks even worse than Excel, which is pretty impressive.

I remember telling someone "ok you put a number in this cell, and a number in this cell, and this formula in this cell and IT AUTOMATICALLY COMPUTES IT" 40 years ago and watching his head explode.

OTOH, I recently showed someone a paper spreadsheet and his head exploded that people did all that manual labor.

I liked Airbus' recent de-microsoft project update. They're basically staying on MS office, windows, everything until Google makes Sheets support the abominations they've come up with in excel and then they're free to migrate everything

Sheets requires you to be logged into Google and working in a (slower) web browser with Google slurping your data. Sheets will never compete with Excel. I run a standalone lifetime Office 2021 installation on a PC where I am logged in on a local account (and not logged into anything MS or Google) with the PC having O&O ShutUp10++ set to turn off all telemetry & MS AI crapola. In addition to Excel being a hell of a lot faster than Sheets for complex spreadsheets, I have a reasonable expectation my data stays private on my PC without me having to air gap it. With Sheets, no way.

I do use LibreOffice; maybe now not its latest release. But while I still find its usability far superior to Excel, it does (did?) lack behind with functionality. Did it catch up in the meantime?

Libre's graphing is nicer - at least for sciencey type plots. And I can have Greek chars in labels !

I remember SuperCalc and longed for GUI based Excel which came out on the Mac first. Then it with, crucially, VBA became core to everythng I did in Engineering. The ease of VBA automation meant you could create fontends for file I/Os, data parsing/manipulation, conversions and presentation/reports and not have to wade through all the rows and columns of data.

Google Sheets isn't the competition and, despite their efforts, neither are Libre/OpenOffice or MS Office clones such as Softmaker and OnlyOffice. Spreadsheets are increasingly becoming relegated to the report format for work that's actually done using Jupyter Notebooks and the like. With a little training most users are quickly more productive and their work more accurate than anything you can do in Excel.

The programmer/blogger Joel Spolsky claimed that Microsoft had done a survey and discovered that most Excel users used it to make and save lists. Those users one could win away to something else, and Google Sheets would be a candidate. But I'd hate to try to take Excel away from an accounting department.

My real complaint about Excel is that some people will use it as if it were a database (lists, yes, but really big lists), which leads to problems.

Excel, or how an ERP is written by the accountants themselves. Except without the security, scalability, reliability, compliance, supportability, auditability and upgradability of a modern ERP.

Costs of that abomination are hidden in years of over serviced, fat Accounting/Finance departments. All Op-Ex, so every one is happy.

Move one file, even migrate to a new file share. Change a drive mapping to a UNC, and the whole lot falls over faster than an Italian football player.

However, most modern ERPs don't have those attributes either, so, really, no loss.

The main problem with Excel is that except in a few select use cases, at best it's the second-best tool for the job.

Its ubiquity, familiarity and its ability to be bastardised with VBA functions though mean that despite not being the best tool for the job, it's the best tool that users have at their disposal without having to fight the finance department for a licence for something more suitable.

I've seen some unholy behemoths in corporates over the years that have grown fungus-like out of Excel. A special mention goes to the UK-based laptop manufacturer I worked at 20 years ago where their entire robotised build line was controlled using a truly spectacular amount of VBA on top of Excel.

One of my first software jobs was to write a program to replace a Lotus-1-2-3 spreadsheet which was used to generate estimates and quotes. Only problem was that there were at least 3 different versions of the spreadsheet and no one could tell me which was the most current one. The project was doomed from the start.

1st January 1900

No, it's definitely the 1st January 1904.

I can, er, go one down on that: "0" gets rendered as "0th January 1900".

I use Excel on a daily basis, but I’m very wary of using it for anything important.

In my experience, Excel is riddled with data-corrupting bugs that are nearly impossible to mitigate from within Excel. This includes silent data loss due to static values in cells being “autocorrected” to nonsense values, even when autocorrection is turned off. This also includes several mathematical functions not doing the calculation they claim to. The values returned seem superficially plausible, but in fact are wrong.

I’m also wary of using Excel for spreadsheets with a substantial number of data cells. Excel becomes unstable and crash-prone.

My advice: Learn Python. Much better at anything that can be done in Excel. Or for simple stuff use an open-source spreadsheet program such as Gnumeric, where fatal bugs get fixed rapidly. In Excel, major bugs are left unfixed for years, possibly decades.

On the other hand, I know an engineer who is an internationally-recognized leader in his field, who uses Excel to design major projects. When gave a presented a talk on his work, he noticed me rolling my eyes, and got a bit offended.

Excel is not a database but people just keeps using it as one.

A few years ago, the scientific community updated the names of several genes to avoid Excel autoformatting:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9325790/

The consensus, apparently, was that this was easier than teaching people to disable the feature or use a more appropriate tool for the job.

This wasn’t autoformatting, this was autocorrection. Autoformatting doesn’t destroy data. Autocorrection does. And does so irreversibly.

Excel provides a toggle to switch autocorrection off, but it doesn’t stick – the toggle automatically toggles itself back on again without notifying the user. There was a lot of discussion about how to mitigate this, but no one was able to come up with a fix other than avoiding Excel like the plague.

> teaching people to disable the feature

The “feature” can only be temporarily disabled. And when it silently turns itself back on even for a fraction of a second, you have a huge mess on your hands.

So this isn’t a case of the users being at fault

Unfortunately, for many years a lot of the leading biomedical journals _required_ authors to submit their data as Excel spreadsheets. More recently, other formats such as CSV are commonly allowed.

Users are only at fault in the sense that Microsoft Office has become such a deeply-ingrained part of workplace culture that most workplaces require it.