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IMHO there is no other application that comes close to Excel in terms of usability, versatility and usefulness.

Disclaimer: No other application has been harmed in the creation of this message.

Disclosure: I have no financial or other interest in Microsoft or other software vendors

No doubt there's a lot to like about it, but also a lot to hate. Mostly (for me) the people who think it's a database program and expect it will happily keep 20 years of sales data and be usable in a multi-user environment

And those that don't understand that Excel likes to strip out zeros at the front if the column is unformatted.

Indeed, Excel often is the single source of truth.

As I was recently at the receiving end of data provided in Excel, with same data each time organised differently in a dozen ways, I'd say that versatility comes at a cost…

I beg to differ. There is Anaplan. https://www.anaplan.com/customers/

Your number one competitor for almost any application you can develop is Excel. As well as the things it does well, it can be made to do *almost anything* to varying degrees of success.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far far different from the one we live in now) as I was bored of my job I did a BMP and JPG pixel to Excel cell mapper just for fun.

Best of all, it wasn't completely pointless, as I got to know the innards of JPG compression.

Every large corporate I've ever worked at basically runs on Excel.

Give people fancy ERP, analytics and BI tools and all these will ever get used for is to create data extracts to be manipulated in Excel.

Its always at best the second best tool for the job for anything, and users like its familiarity.

Yep, I spend hours creating beautiful reports and dashboards for the users to just export to Excel.

Those of us who were in the trenches in the late 80s and early 90s remember that Lotus 123 enjoyed a similar position of worshipful allegiance. We still remember the beancounters writing letters using one big row per line, because the answer was Lotus 123, no matter the question.

Excel may seem unassailable, but the history of computing suggests it's supremacy is just a matter of =TIME()

For real nightmares, you need Lotus Notes rather than 123.

I'll see your Lotus Notes and raise you Lotus Manuscript.

I once worked at a place that used Lotus Notes, and I was glad to leave it behind.

A week later, I found myself wanting Notes back. My new place used Novell Groupwise,,,

> writing letters using one big row per line

Sounds like the "word processor" in Lotus Symphony (DOS version).

I worked on a huge payroll system. We had a user who cost us a lot of time and money because he was phished with an Excel sheet that contained a macro virus. So security insisted on the introduction of code signing. Which was good. Within an hour an angry user appeared in my office screaming that I had "ruined" that weeks payroll run. I couldn't get much sense out of him so followed him to his desk where many excitable payroll people yelled at me, at lot.

It turned out that there was an issue with how the payroll system presented dates. To work around this the shouter-in-chief had designed his own Excel spreadsheet with a macro to change the date format and prepare a CSV file that was exported to the secure print system to print out the payslips. He'd then insisted that his minions use his spreadsheet. Only now it didn't work because his greyware had never been tested or approved by anyone and he sure as heck couldn't get his code signed.

I pointed out that it would take one of our DB people about, oh, fifteen seconds to change the database to display dates in the format they wanted and probably half a day maximum to get that through QA. But since it would be a trivial change that I could authorise the use of the code now and QA could follow on at their own pace. Not good enough for Mr Shouty. He wanted his code running *now* and wasn't prepared to accept that someone whose job it was to make changes could do a better job than him.

He took it to the CEO. I lost, in the worst way possible. I was told to revert to permitting unsigned macros to be run because that way Mr Shouty could continue to "Add value to the business" with his homebrew. I think they still use the cobbled together mess.

I used to know an accounts clerk who typed numbers into Lotus 123 on and IBM AT, added them up on a calculator, then typed in the total. And she kept a paper spreadsheet as a backup.

I preferred SuperCalc myself.

Excel, and indeed spreadsheets in general are great. Until people start using them as databases, which seems to be 95% of cases.

Worse, is the problem that manglement often won't support moving this to proper platform because £££.

But SAP and Excel, god an unholy hybrid that is indeed.

It’s been years since I looked into this but I remember that when the people who developed the OpenDocument standard went about reverse engineering the Excel format for interoperability they ran into quite a few issues that put me off using Excel formats for anything important.

The OpenDocument standards team received a lot of input from mathematics professors to prevent the mistakes that Microsoft had made. I believe they also had input from the European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (whose [1]list of Spreadsheet horrors is a frightening read) to prevent common human error when working with spreadsheets.

There is a leap year bug carried over from Lotus 1-2-3. They screwed up the leap year maths and incorrectly considered 1900 to be a leap year. Not a problem if you never venture more than a century ago but if you have time series that go back to before 1900 your calculations will be off in Excel. [2]Excel wrongly assumes 1900 is a leap year

I believe there was an issue with the order in which Excel performs certain operations (not entirely BODMAS?). If I recall correctly it would screw up mortgage calculations.

Anyone know more about this? The leap year bug is a WONTFIX, any others?

[1] http://eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year